View by category
Research Areas can be defined or chosen from a predefined list. You can also find below search tips when you create a Research Area.
SciVal gives you the flexibility to model, evaluate and benchmark any field of research. This can be a strategic priority, an emerging area of science or any other topic of interest.
Once you have defined a Research Area, you can:
- Evaluate your institution’s output in that field
- See and compare your output with other institutions and researchers are active in this field
- Identify the top performing and fastest growing countries, authors and institutions in the field
- See which Scopus sources contain the most publications from the Research Area
- See what the most important Topics are within the field
- Identify existing and potential new collaboration partners
User-defined Research Areas can be created with up to 200,000 publications in them and can be as granular or interdisciplinary as you like.
Research Areas are not fixed, but represent a dynamic definition of a field of science. Each week when the publication data from Scopus is updated, new publications matching the definition are added to the Research Area, meaning the Research Area can grow over time.
How
Below are different ways to work with Research Areas:
The definition of a Research Area can either be keywords or entities. If this definition is too broad, you can apply filters to narrow it down further.
Example: Your institution has made research on graphene a strategic focus. You are specifically interested in research on the thermal conductivity of graphene, and want to see how well your institution performs in this area.
You can define a Research Area from the entity selection panel in Overview, Benchmarking and Trends modules or from My SciVal.
- Go to the Overview, Benchmarking or Trends module.
- Open the 'Research Areas' section of the entity selection panel on the left-hand side of the screen.
- Click on 'Add new' at the bottom of the panel, or click in the Research Area search bar and choose'Define a new Research Area.'
- Click 'Define a new Research Area'.
A pop-up window will now open. Here you can define your Research Area using a 3-step process.
Part 2: Define your Research Area
- Go to the tab 'Use search terms'.
- Enter 'thermal conduction graphene' in the input field.
- Select 'Search'.
Note: You can use this search field like the advanced search field in Scopus, incorporating double quotes, parentheses etc. If you're not comfortable writing your own search strings, you can click on the 'Use the search query fields' link to enter a more guided search mode. you can also base your Research Area on other entities (Scopus Sources, Subject Areas, Institutions and Countries/Regions) or Topics
Here you can see how many publications worldwide (since 1996) match the definition 'thermal conduction graphene'.
Apply filters (if needed) to narrow down the definition of your Research Area. Let’s say that you are interested only in academic publications. To filter out other organization types:
- Click on the tab 'Organization types'.
- Check 'Academic'.
- Select 'Limit to'.
The filter you have just applied will now be shown on the right side of the screen. Click 'Next Step' in the bottom right corner to proceed to step 3.
Note that if your Research Area is larger than 10,000 publications, it can take up to 6 hours to be computed and the folowing message appears:
Part 4: Name and save your Research Area
- Name your Research Area 'Thermal Conductivity Graphene (Academic)'.
- Optionally, give your Research Area a description and some tags. These can be used to help you remember what the Research Area represents and can give more context to your colleagues if you choose to share it.
- Click 'Save and finish'.
Your Research Area is now computed, and you are returned to your previous place in SciVal.
See the 'Search tips' section below for more help with using search terms to define a Research Area.
For instant analysis, SciVal offers predefined Research Areas such as all Scopus 334 classifications and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in Overview, Benchmarking and Trends.
There is also a folder of Curated Reserach Areas, which are developed to cover specific areas of research such as quantum technology and COVID-19. To see which ones are available to you, go to My SciVal and select Research Areas from the left panel. For more information about the Scopus subject classification visit the Journal Title List.
Search technology in SciVal.
When you use search terms to define your Research Area, SciVal will search the Scopus database for publications matching your search terms. We search through the publication titles, as well as the abstracts and the keywords assigned to each publication by the author, along with Engineering and Medical controlled terms captued in Scopus. Please note that the search technology used in SciVal and Scopus are different, so you may see different results when using the same search terms in each platform.
Key search tips for creating a Research Area
- Choose search terms that are specific and closely related to your Research Area.
- Avoid very general terms like 'cell'.
Your syntax will make a difference in how SciVal interprets your search
- 'Solar flare' is interpreted as 'solar AND flare', which may be located next to each other or in separate sentences
- 'Solar-flare' is also interpreted as 'solar AND flare'
- Enclose the search terms in double quotes (for example "solar flare") to bring back exact matches only. This search will find publications containing 'solar flare' but not 'solar-flare'.
- Stop words are always ignored. Stop words include personal pronouns (such as 'he', 'she', 'we', 'they'); most articles (such as 'the', 'an'); most forms of the verb to be (such as 'be', 'is', 'was'); and some conjunctions (such as 'as', 'because', 'if', 'when').
SciVal ignores accents and upper/lower case
- The search is not case-sensitive. It will match both upper-case and lower-case text.
- Terms containing accented characters will be found if you type in the unaccented version, for example u to represent ü or ú
SciVal uses a stemming algorithm that reduces words to their root form
- If you enter 'fishing', 'fished', 'fish', or 'fisher', they will all be stemmed automatically so that the search is conducted on the root word, 'fish'.
- If you use the singular form of a word, your search will retrieve the singular, plural, and possessive forms of most words.
- Search strings containing wild-cards are not reduced to their root form
You can find variants using wild-card searching
- ? replaces a single character. For example, 'organi?ation' will return both 'organisation' and 'organization'.
- * replaces one or more characters. For example, 'cat*' will return 'catastrophe', 'catheter', 'catnip', and so on
SciVal uses the Boolean operators AND, OR, NOT
- Entering 'blood cell' will search for 'blood AND cell'.
- Entering 'cat AND dog OR mouse' we will search for '(cat AND dog) OR mouse'.
- If you specify parentheses, they will be followed and not overridden. If you enter 'cat AND (dog OR mouse)' we will search for 'cat AND (dog OR mouse)'.
- If you don't use parentheses, we will add them to simulate operative precedence - AND takes precedence over OR. If you enter 'cat OR dog AND mouse' we will search for 'cat OR (dog AND mouse)'
Within SciVal there is a folder of curated, pre-defined Research Areas which will grow over time. The current folder contains a Research Area on COVID-19 and General Coronal Virus Research, both of which were used to create the Coronavirus map on the free Coronavirus Pure portal and the interactive map on the Novel Coronavirus Information Center, along with Publications with datasets indexed in Mendeley Data Monitor and various quantum searches such as Quantum Communications.
Some of these Research Areas come from direct data cuts using 2 Scopus searches. This means that although they are Research Areas, the data within in them is static and updated roughly every 2 months. We are working to make these are weekly feed as with the rest of the Scopus data. To find out more about the composition of the Research Areas, along with the last time they were updated with new publications from Scopus, select it in My SciVal and click the (i) icon.
Did we answer your question?
Related answers
Recently viewed answers
Functionality disabled due to your cookie preferences