Research Portal News

A new tool in SciVal's Spotlight (ask the Research Office - Dr Dianne Bond - if you want a login) is under the "Explore Collaboration" tab.   

This brings up a world map with an overlay showing how many institutions in any given country UCT has collaborations with.  The following slideshow will illustrate what happens on a drilldown - taking Australia as a starting point.

In simple terms, it is possible to see - very quickly - just who UCT researchers collaborate with, where they are - and possible collaborative partners we may have missed.

I can actually see my car, too - good job, shows I was at work that day.

Seriously, and although UCT does supply a set of maps of campus, these are hard to find.

It is a whole lot simpler to simply use Google Maps directly - and the depth of coverage, and extent of naming, is incredible.  For Upper Campus.  Pity about the rest...B-)

 And yes, it did help me find the Menzies Building

The coverage goes right down to street views - where you can almost see people smoking weed in the bushes you know, walking about.  Great tool for nostalgic alumni to retrace their footsteps.

UCT has recently acquired the Scival Spotlight institutional evaluation tool from Elsevier, via a grant from the Carnegie Foundation: this allows graphical analysis of an institution's output in terms of "co-citation analysis", which allows the creation of "Competencies".  The tool allows one to drill down via graphics or tables, from a "whole of UCT" level, down to individual researchers - and to individual publications, h-index calculations and much, much more, given that we now also have Elsevier's Scopus - thank you , UCT Libraries!!!

IF the researchers are represented in a competency...which is not a given!  

However, what it does do at the institutional level is allow very quick identification of emerging vs established vs declining areas of scholarship, and what is most attractive is that it does it without regard to the kinds of straightjacket that makes such a nonsense of cross-, inter- and transdisciplinary research.

We will have fun in the years ahead.  It will also be available via the Research portal.  Meanwhile, here's a slideshow for your amusement!

Given that these days a fair bit of the business of academics here at UCT seems to consist of trying to find out how good we are, at least in terms of rating of our publications, it is useful to know that there are an increasing number of good ways of doing just this.

Thomson-Reuters' ISI Web of Science:
This is available via the Libraries site (and right here), is a tried and trusted means of seeing just who has published what, how often, and what their Hirsch, or h-index is.

Elsevier's Scopus database:
This is also newly available, via UCT Libraries' generosity, and can be accessed here.  It won't give you as high an h-index if you were publishing before 1996, because it doesn't do citations from before that - however, it has a wider coverage than WoS, so may find more papers.  It also has a MUCH better way of identifying papers by the same authors.

Google Scholar:
This is becoming increasingly useful these days - and, which will please all those software libertarians, is FREE! There is a useful Mozilla add-on for Scholar, which calculates h-indices for you.  Better still, there is

Google Scholar Citations:
With a little training, this will find ALL your publications, and immediately give you lifelong and 5-year h-indices - as well as an "i10 index", which is NOT another Hyundai, but "... is the number of publications with at least 10 citations". 

Incidentally, you will almost certainly get a significantly higher h-index via GS Citations than with the other two proprietary systems.

Another, far more Humanities- and even Computer Science-friendly option is 

Harzing's Publish or Perish:
This is "...a software program that retrieves and analyzes academic citations. It uses Google Scholar to obtain the raw citations, then analyzes these and presents the following statistics..."

And then, for those those who don't like the "pay for" options AND are in disciplines not well covered by the above offerings (Scopus is NOT good for Humanities, it turns out), AND who want alternative sorts of evaluations, there's...

AltMetrics! 
I played with this during Open Web 2.0 guru Cameron Neylon's very interesting talk at UCT recently under the auspices of SCAP, when I was able to determine during the talk (via iPad) that a certain story which shall not be mentioned in polite company, had garnered some 1560 mentions in Twitter and Facebook in just two months. A very good tool for assessing blog or other Web posting impact, it would appear - and here's a great blog on the subject, courtesy of my guru, AJ Cann, via Google+.

Cameron also mentioned Total-impact.org, dedicated to uncovering the "invisible impact of research", but I haven't played with that.

Celia's Blog here at UCT has a very useful list of AltMetrics as well. 

Article describing the AltMetrics movement:

The altmetrics movement is "...a sprawling constellation of projects and like-minded people working at research institutions, libraries, and publishers" - an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

SO there you are: a catalogue of means of tracking yourself (although auto-AltMetricking doesn't have same vaguely sinister ring that Auto-Googling does) and improving NRF rating assessments - and possibly your promotional prospects.  If you care.  And they'll all be available via the Research Portal.