Elsevier, a world-leading provider of scientific, technical, and medical information products and services, and the University of Surrey, U.K., have signed a three-year agreement for access to Elsevier’s research performance benchmarking tool SciVal Strata.
The University of Surrey is one of the few universities in the United Kingdom with a dedicated bibliometrician as part of its library staff. As a result, the role of the library is taking on a new, innovative dimension by driving the use of bibliometrics to help improve the institution’s overall research impact.
SciVal Strata, part of the SciVal suite, is a flexible benchmarking tool enabling analyses of internal and external team and researcher performance which includes, among others, productivity, citation history, and collaboration activity. Access to SciVal Strata enables the university’s research faculty to benchmark their current performance and illustrate their impact, in comparison to other institutions, which can in part, be used to determine future research strategies.
“Our experiences with SciVal Strata have been very positive,” states Kate Price, Head of E-Strategy and Resources of the University of Surrey Library. “On one hand it has enough depth and flexibility to assess our current performance, but on the other hand the interface is simple enough to use as an introduction to bibliometrics and impact measurement for faculty and research staff. We have found that the impartiality of the Library has greatly helped raise the positive perception of bibliometrics within the institution.”
“The role of the librarian in spearheading the effort to introduce bibliometrics to improve their research impact is significant,” said Niels Weertman, Vice President, SciVal at Elsevier. “The deployment of SciVal Strata demonstrates yet another critical expert advisory role played by the university’s library to drive improvements in their internal processes that, ultimately, will help them maintain their leadership in cutting-edge science.”
Recent enhancements to SciVal Strata developed in collaboration with Elsevier’s online community of research administrators, have helped align the tool with the requirements set by the Research Excellence Framework (REF) and other guidelines. The Research Excellence Framework in the UK uses Scopus as the data source for the bibliometric indicators, the same data source that powers SciVal Strata.
