STM publisher Elsevier has announced the launch of SciVal Trends, a new module within SciVal, Elsevier's tool to analyse and benchmark the world of research, and part of the Elsevier Research Intelligence portfolio of tools and services.
The Trends module builds on SciVal's existing flexibility to define and analyse user created research areas – for instance, by key words or discipline, at a journal, institution or country level – based on citation and publication data from Scopus. The novel functionality in the Trends module is that it now includes research analyses based on usage data drawn from both Scopus and ScienceDirect. With approximately one-third of all researchers classified as not-publishing, and therefore not-citing, usage metrics provide valuable insights into research behaviour of an impactful group of researchers that may otherwise remain 'hidden.'
Combining these functionalities – citation, publication and usage data – the SciVal Trends module provides a new, full set of research-strategic, analytical markers for its users, which can, among others: visualise growing and declining topics in user created research areas; target popular research papers at country, institution and/ or author level; analyse research performance with new metrics, including: Views Count, Views Per Publication and Field-Weighted Views Impact; and highlight relevant and frequently occurring keywords or phrases within research areas through word cloud visualisations.
