Northwestern University, in collaboration with STM publisher Elsevier, Netherlands, has announced its participation in VIVO, a semantic network that enables the discovery of researchers across institutions. By bringing its researchers together in a single hub called Northwestern Scholars, an implementation of Elsevier's SciVal Experts research networking tool, and connecting to VIVO through SciVal, Northwestern University facilitates collaboration and accelerates knowledge discovery within the organisation and with other research institutions all through the US and beyond.
Northwestern Scholars provides the Northwestern University research community, other research organisations and the public with a networking website and searchable database to discover Northwestern faculty members' individual research expertise. The hub is populated with publication data from Elsevier's Scopus database and Northwestern University's own grants and faculty appointment data as well as investigators' curriculum vitae data. The application contains profiles for nearly 3,000 researchers across Northwestern's 12 schools, housing over 115,000 publications.
By connecting to the VIVO semantic network, Northwestern University can now share its data with other web-based applications that support research collaboration. VIVO uses a common data standard that allows research expertise software applications to work together seamlessly, and provides a framework for open discovery of research networks. VIVO-compliant software tools can now use Northwestern University's profile data to help scholars across the globe discover Northwestern faculty members' expertise, and in turn investigators at Northwestern can use the tools to find experts at other institutions.
SciVal Experts uses the Elsevier Fingerprint Engine, an advanced semantic technology, to identify investigators' specific areas of expertise. This makes it easier to find collaborators and build an intellectual inventory of the university. Now available to all institutions, SciVal Experts' VIVO integration can save organisations the substantial time and resources required to launch and maintain their own research networking system.
