Institutional hierarchies FAQs

The hierarchy view shows which Scopus affiliations are mapped to a SciVal Institution, and how they are related.  

What do the relationship types mean?

Part of:  An affiliation is considered part of another organization if they are directly controlled by and subordinated to them. Typical examples of suborganizations include schools, divisions, faculties, colleges, and departments, research centers within a university, subdivisions, branches, subsidiaries within a company and divisions, agencies, departments within a governmental organization. 

Jointly owned: An affiliation is considered jointly owned if it is owned and controlled jointly by 2 or more Institutions. The jointly owned by relationship is useful in the case of research institutes established jointly by academic institutions, funding bodies, and other organizations to advance the state of science and scholarship in a particular area.  

Sponsored by: An affiliation is considered to be sponsored by an Institution if they are financially supported by the Institution but operated by another Institution for administrative purposes.  

Affiliated attributable: An affiliation is considered to be “affiliated attributable” to an Institution when it is legally independent, but yet closely aligned with it. This relationship is useful in the case of hospitals that may be legally independent from a university, but are tightly integrated with the university in terms of shared facilities, faculties and resources. 

How can a relationship be “Unknown”? 

The relationship types we display on SciVal are based on the data in Scopus and we can only show relationship types if they are captured in the data. In case SciVal has affiliations mapped to an institution for which no relationship type can be found in the source data, we display the relationship type as “Unknown”.  

How are the publication counts calculated? 

If a hierarchy has multiple levels, publication counts are rolled up to the parent level. For affiliations that have other affiliations beneath them, this means that the publication counts represent the deduplicated sum of their own publications plus the publication counts of their suborganizations.  

For affiliations without other affiliations beneath them, the number of publications shown is exactly the number of publications assigned to that affiliation. 

If filters are being applied, the publication counts reflect the filtered structure. For example, if jointly owned affiliations are filtered out, the publications assigned to these affiliations are no longer included in the publication count of the parent affiliation. 

The list seems to be missing affiliations. 

The Institution structure you see on SciVal may not represent the actual organizational structure of the respective Institution. We only capture affiliations that have a Scopus affiliation profile with publications assigned to it.