Back to the Future: Institute for Scientific Information Re-established Within Clarivate Analytics

    Clarivate Analytics, the global leader in providing trusted insights and analytics to accelerate the pace of innovation, today announced it will re-establish the prestigious Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) to its Scientific and Academic Research Group. This new incarnation of the institute will be focused on the development of existing and new bibliometric and analytical approaches, fostering collaborations with partners and customers across the academic community.

    Annette Thomas, CEO of the Scientific and Academic Research group at Clarivate Analytics explains: “For 50 years the Institute for Scientific Information was the key source of research and product development in the world of scientometrics. It was the founding company of all that is Clarivate Analytics and the heart of what is now the Scientific and Academic Research group.

    “The newly energized ISI will be a place where we house our expertise, experience and deep thinking that drives our editorial rigor, our policy and partnerships, rankings and analytics. From the institute we will work with and for the research community – researchers, publishers, governments, industry bodies, libraries and funders will all be welcome. The institute will be both the heart and soul of our group and the brains behind our most complex thinking to solve the problems of our community.”

    Established in 1960 by Dr Eugene Garfield, ISI produced the Science Citation Index – the first citation index for the sciences – in 1964, followed by the Social Sciences Citation Index, the Arts & Humanities Citation Index, as well as the Journal Citation Reports including Journal Impact Factors, all during the 1970s. These indexes were gathered together and introduced in 1997 as the Web of Science on the internet.  This revolutionized the way people searched for information of interest. Dr Garfield anticipated the advent of hyperlinked pages on the web and the appearance of the Google Search algorithm (the patent for which cites Garfield). It took 40 years for technological developments to catch up with Eugene Garfield’s vision.

    As part of Clarivate Analytics, ISI will benefit from access to a wealth of data from the Web of Science. With close to 150 million records from 33,000 journals, Web of Science‘s unique collection of resources provides researchers with the breadth they need to be comprehensive without sacrificing the precision they need to understand the nuances of their field.  ISI will promote greater academia-industry collaboration and plans to draw upon the rich, enhanced patent data from the group’s flagship IP database, the Derwent World Patent Index (DWPI). This patent-smart technology will provide the Institute with a unique lens on innovation.

    Leading the re-establishment of ISI, will be Samantha Burridge, Director of Strategy and Transformation, ably assisted by both a strong internal team and a plethora of new hires:

    • Dr Jonathan Adams will return to the Institute for Scientific Information in April 2018 as a Director. Previously, he was the lead founder of Evidence Ltd (2000-2009) and Director of Research Evaluation for Thomson Reuters (2009-2013). He was a science policy adviser to the UK for the Research Councils (1989- 1992) where he first worked with ISI to introduce bibliometrics to UK research evaluationHe will join from Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, where he currently holds the post of Chief Scientist, Digital Science.
    • Dr Nandita Quaderi has joined Clarivate Analytics as Editor in Chief of the Scientific and Academic Research group. In addition to driving Clarivate Analytic’s role as the arbiter of quality in research, Dr Quaderi will work with ISI to determine the metrics that Clarivate Analytics will use to set and measure quality standards across the Web of Science. Dr Quaderi was Publishing Director of Open Research at Springer Nature where she led Scientific Reports to become the largest journal in the world. Nandita has a BSc in Molecular Genetics from the University of Oxford and a PhD in Molecular Genetics from Imperial College. She has been awarded the highly competitive Wellcome Trust Research Career Development Fellowship; the Charles Epstein Trainee Research award from the American Society for Human Genetics; and the prestigious EU Marie Curie Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship.
    • Clarivate Analytics has engaged the education data analytics and consulting company, SchoolDash to support ISI in an advisory capacity, as part of a broader mission to promote data science in academia and education. Its founder, Dr Timo Hannay, was previously the founding managing director of Digital Science, which he ran from its inception in 2010 until 2015, when he left to launch SchoolDash. Dr Hannay was also the co-founder of Science Foo Camp, an annual science and technology event held each summer at Google, and has previously worked as director of nature.com, a consultant at McKinsey & Company, a writer for The Economist, and a research neurophysiologist at the University of Oxford. He is currently a non-executive director of Sage Publishing.

    Samantha Burridge concludes, “ISI will not only lead in new metrics but it will crucially, be built on the deep and rich experience, understanding and insight of its foundations of setting the standards in responsible metrics. We will stay true to our founding principles while reinterpreting them for a very different world. We will remain committed to promoting integrity in research. In a sense, we’re going back to the future.”

    Biographies:

    Dr Jonathan Adams, Director of the Institute for Scientific Information

    Dr Adams is currently the Chief Scientist at Digital Science and will join Clarivate Analytics as a Director of ISI in April 2018. Jonathan is a visiting professor at the Policy Institute at King’s College London. Previously, he was the lead founder of Evidence Ltd (2000-2009) and Director of Research Evaluation for Thomson Reuters (2009-2013).  Evidence developed products and services providing decision support to research managers and carried out research evaluation for agencies and institutions in the UK, elsewhere in Europe, Brazil, Australia, China, India, Singaporeand Malaysia.

    Jonathan chaired the EC Evaluation Monitoring Committee for Framework Programme 6 (2004); chaired the Monitoring Group of the European Research Fund for Coal & Steel (2006); led the national review of research evaluation in New Zealand (2008); was a member of the Australian Research Council (ARC) indicators development group for its research excellence assessment (2008) and ARC’s impact assessment (2016). In 2010 he was an expert adviser to the interim evaluation of FP7.

    Jonathan has worked at King’s College London (1979-1980), University of Newcastle upon Tyne (1980-1983), University of Leeds (1983-1989) and Imperial College London (1989-1992). He was a science policy adviser to the UK for the Research Councils (1989- 1992) where he first worked with ISI to introduce bibliometrics to UK research evaluation, and was Leeds University’s Director of Research Strategy 1993 – 1997. He has published over 100 articles in journals, a series of widely quoted reports on research in the BRIC economies and regularly presents at international research conferences.  In 2017, he received an honorary DSc from the University of Exeter for his work in higher education and research policy.

    Dr Nandita Quaderi, Editor in Chief – the Scientific and Academic Research group, Clarivate Analytics   

    Nandita will be responsible for creating the strategy required to innovate and further propel Clarivate’s role as the arbiter of quality in research across journals, books, proceedings. She has accountability for defining how Clarivate can extend the quality stamp into additional content types e.g. peer-reviewed articles, pre-prints, datasets, software etc and will determine the metrics Clarivate will use to set and measure quality standards across the various content sets.

    Nandita will contribute significant editorial and research insight to the development of new SAR products and services with a robust editorial value proposition e.g. Journal Impact Factor, article level metrics and individual researcher level metrics. A key component of her role will be sharing policy development and key industry insight to build expertise and ensure that the business is recognized as a leader for data and analytics and in the evaluation of the impact of research on a global scale with institutions, funders and governments.

    Nandita is an accomplished senior publishing executive with a deep understanding of the research community built on a strong research background.  Nandita received her Bachelors in Molecular Genetics from the University of Oxford and her PhD in Molecular Genetics from Imperial College. She has been awarded the highly competitive Wellcome Trust Research Career Development Fellowship; the Charles Epstein Trainee Research award from the American Society for Human Genetics; and the prestigious EU Marie Curie Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship. As part of Nandita’s post-doctoral research at The Telethon Institute of Genetics and Medicine (TIGEM), Milan, she cloned the gene for Opitz syndrome resulting; her research was subsequently published in Nature Genetics for which she was the lead author.

    Most recently she was Publishing Director, Open Research at Springer Nature where she had responsibility for the Nature Research OA portfolio. She led Scientific Reports through a period of unprecedented growth – output has increased six-fold over past three years and it is now the largest journal in the world. She had responsibility for the conception and launch of three major OA Nature Research titles – Communications Biology, Communications Chemistry and Communications Physics.  She also has a wealth of experience in leading strategy for portfolio growth, taking into consideration subject coverage, regional opportunities, funder initiatives and transfer cascades between journals.