Release Notes 2017-2018

The December 4, 2018 release brings additional metrics guidance to SciVal:

• Responsible Use of Metrics - incomplete years - Throughout SciVal we now indicate if the data in the analyses is incomplete and therefore if the metrics may be more volatile for the year. This is done via a dotted line for line charts and striped lines in bar charts.
• Responsible Use of Metrics - guidance - In-product metric guidance, which has been taken from the new Research Metrics Guidebook, is now available for all metrics in Benchmarking. The additional information, will help users better understand the metrics and potentially avoid misinterpretation of them by understanding their strengths and weaknesses. Suggested partner metrics are also provided for additional analysis.
• We've added more metrics in Benchmarking - It is now possible to include 20 additional metrics in the Benchmarking table view, which can be exported for deeper analysis in Excel. For these additional metrics, we’ve made it easy to apply additional settings (such as include or exclude self-citations) to all of the newly selected metrics.
• See the collaboration of researchers - You can now explore the current collaboration of a researcher to uncover areas of impact in the table view of the Collaboration module.
• Chinese RAUNKE now available - For relevant Chinese institutions, you can now see their ranking in the 2018 China's Best Universities by Shanghai Ranking Consultancy in the Overview module, along with the QS, THE and ARWU rankings.

The November 6, 2018 release lets you synchronize your hierarchies in SciVal with a master spreadsheet:

• Synchronize your hierarchy structures in SciVal - Easily create, modify and update your organizational hierarchy in SciVal using a master spreadsheet. You can already populate and share institutional structures in SciVal, so your users have a unified starting point for their analyses. With this release you can now add new researchers to your existing structure and synchronize the hierarchies using a master spreadsheet.
• Build Research Areas from Topics - Combine any combination of Topics together to form a Research Area, then analyze it to find out the top researchers and rising stars. The only limitation is your imagination and the 100,000 document limit.
• Collaboration module enhancements - To help identify strong regions of co-authorship we’ve introduced a new heatmap visualization in the Collaboration module. You can now also include the table view in your reports, with the new Add to Reporting functionality.

The September 18, 2018 release lets you find institutions using local names:

• Diacritic support - To help you find an institution faster, we have enhanced the way we display institution names. We now support local language characters, multiple name variations for an institution (English and up to two local name variations) and a common acronym. We are rolling this out over the coming months. Please contact your local customer consultant if you would like to make changes your institution’s name in SciVal.
• Reporting enhancements - You can now add an analysis directly to an existing Report, or create a new Report within the module you're using.
• Enhanced flow to define Research Areas - We've simplified the search options when defining a Research Area and included an advanced search for our power users that like to use more complex search strings.

The August 28, 2018 release lets you explore related Topics in Trends and see papers published at your ‘home’ institution:

• Expand the discovery process with related Topics - Related Topics in Trends helps you discover relevant Topics along with the key papers, researchers and institutions.
• Three additional subject classifications - We have added three new subject classifications to SciVal - THE, QS & KAKEN. You will be able to adjust which subject classifications you see, based on your own personal needs.
• See only the publications from researchers when published at their 'home' institution - Previously when you looked at a researcher in SciVal you saw all the publications they have in their profile. The new home institution filter allows you to see the actual publications productivity of any researcher whilst they've been affiliated with their ‘home’ institution. This filter is available for Researchers and Groups of Researchers.
• Topic Prominence Heat map for Groups of Institutions in the Overview module - The Heat map gives you a quick overview of the Topics that a selection of Institutions are active in. The map is presented in a matrix format, the darker green the box, the more articles the particular Institution has published relating to that Topic. A ‘Navigator’ allows you to move easily through the Heat map matrix.
• More Reporting enhancements allow you to add analyses from the Trends module to Reporting, including the key phrase analysis in the Trends summary page. 
• A new edition of the Research Metrics Guidebook is now available, and is intended to be a straightforward, practical companion to SciVal and Scopus. It provides some facts about how the data underlying the metrics are used, how the metrics are calculated and displayed, and about variables besides performance that can affect the metrics.

The July 10, 2018 release lets you see your key contributing Topics and report on them:

• Topic Prominence: Introducing Key Contributors for Institutions - Users can filter to see only the Topics where their institution is a key contributor, determined by document or citation counts within the Topic. The ‘Key Topics’ toggle will be available within the Table and Wheel views, and gives institutions a much better overview of Topics in which they are making a significant contribution and are leaders in the field.
  An entity will be a Key Contributor in a Topic if:

  • They have at least 1/3 (33.3%) as many papers, as the top publishing entity in the Topic; and/or
  • They have at least 1/3 (33.3%) as many citations, as the top cited entity in the Topic.
• Topic Prominence: Support Groups of Institutions - See the Topics to which groups of institutions (either user defined or pre-defined)contribute.
• Reporting enhancements: Create instant reports from the Overview Summary page -You can now add the "Overall research performance" section and the entire Summary page from Overview, along with the Wheel of Science and table from Topics to Reporting. There's also the option to export 10 reports and/or analyses as one zip file, e.g. export a folder of Reports and Analyses as an XLS or CSV file. Users can export a maximum of 10 reports and/or analyses (each report can have up to 20 analyses in it).
• More publication links in Overview - In Overview, when looking at the published by subject area table, users can now click on the publication numbers to see the underlying list of publications.

The June 12, 2018 release lets you easily move your institutional hierarchies from Pure to SciVal:

• Easily transfer, update and maintain your institution's hierarchy structure from Pure to SciVal:

  • Choose all or part of your hierarchy to synchronize with SciVal, then share the structure with your users so they have a unified starting point for their analyses.
  • We have also improved the matching process for researcher groups that are imported manually into SciVal.
• Make your report library easier to navigate - customize the names of the analyses when you add them to your library with explanatory terms for quicker identification and ordering. You can also now rename the analyses in your library, so older analyses names can be made more descriptive. There are more improvements to Reporting coming in the following releases!
• Based on your feedback, the h5-index metric has been modified to count not only documents, but also citations in the same 5-year time window. This allows a true year-on-year comparisons in the Benchmarking module.
• We’ve expanded the SciVal API to support predefined groups of researchers and predefined groups of countries.

  • Also please be aware that the SciVal API URL has been updated: it used to be /metrics/ but has changed to /analytics/scival. We will still support /metrics/ for the next few months, but it will eventually be removed. Please ensure you update your API calls accordingly.

The May 15, 2018 release brings Representative publications for Topic Prominence:

• Get up to speed on Topics, quickly and easily. With over 97,000 unique Topics identified in SciVal, a key question we heard from you was, how can you get an understanding of Topics with which you’re not familiar? The introduction of ‘Representative publications’ - which are papers centrally cited, at the core of a particular Topic – will to provide you with a deeper understanding of the Topic.
• Based upon your feedback we have updated the color scheme for the keyphrase word cloud in the Trends module. Green now represents growing keyphrases, whereas blue keyphrases are declining. When hovering over a particular keyphrase, it will turn orange for ease of identification. The calculation using Elsevier’s Fingerprinting Technology, to extract distinctive keyphrases in a particular Research Area, remains unchanged.
• As part of last month’s Newton release, we merged the Analyses and Reports libraries for ease of use and navigation. We have now made further enhancements:

  • Filter your Reports and Analyses, to quickly identify items of interest in a large Library of Reports
  • Merge several Reports or Folders (containing several Reports) together
  • Copy feature allows you to duplicate anything in Reporting to use as a template
• And there’s even more to come! Further reporting enhancements will be visible over the next few releases

The April 17, 2018 release brings enhancements to Reporting:

• Through extensive user testing and customer feedback, we will be making a number of enhancements to Reporting over the coming months.
• In the Newton release we simplified the way you create and maintain your reports. Combining the Analyses and Reports into one singular library (instead of 2 separate ones), gives you a clear overview of your saved analyses and simplifies the report creation process
• The new folders feature allows you to arrange your reports and analyses into multiple folders for easy access
• And there’s more to come! Further reporting enhancements will be visible over the next few releases

The March 13, 2018 release introduces great new enhancements:

• As part of the Kepler release, we released Topics for Researchers and Groups of Researchers. Now Researchers are able to analyze Topics in greater detail, to see their individual metrics such as FWCI, collaboration, views etc. (previously only available for Institutions, Countries and Worldwide).
• Pre-defined groups of institutions, such as regional (California, Berlin etc) or academic (Ivy League, Russell Group, Rosatom) can now be viewed in the Collaboration module to see the impact of their work together.
• You now have the option to remove hyper-authored papers in the Collaboration module. Based upon feedback from SciVal customers, the three co-author thresholds of 10, 50 and 100 authors were identified as being the most relevant. Currently this functionality is available when looking at publication lists in all four modules. In this release, you can now filter on author numbers in the Collaboration module, which will then affect the results in both the map and table views.

The February 13, 2018 release introduces great new enhancements:

• Following on from last month’s release, where we introduced the h5-index, you will now be able to display and use it in your own systems, via the API. Just as a reminder: The h5-index has been added to the existing basket of metrics, and is the h-index based upon data from the last 5 years e.g. when selecting 2016, the h5-index will use publications from 2012-2016 and their corresponding citations.
• Save time with the new drag and drop feature in Overview and Trends, which lets you quickly evaluate specific researchers without the need to import them. You can simply select one or more authors from the author lists in Overview and Trends, then drag and drop them into the left hand selection panel to start analyzing them.
• We've updated our Australian FoR journal mapping to allow more accurate analyses of your SciVal entities before the next round of the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) later this year. Download the full FoR mapping spreadsheet (updated May 2018)(Opens in a new tab or window)

The January 18, 2018 release starts the new year with a bang!

• Topic Prominence in Science is now available for Researchers and Groups of Researchers. Providing them with a much clearer picture of their overall research performance, and insight into the momentum or level of activity of particular Topics
• Book and Book Chapters are now available as a publication output metric, in the Benchmarking module
• The h5-index is now available. It is the h-index based upon data from the last 5 years e.g. when selecting 2016, the h5-index will be for 2012-2016
• The ASJC subject classification filtering has been enhanced for Topics.
• Following on from last month’s release, where the ASJC subject classification filters were introduced for Topic Prominence in Science, and based upon feedback, we have now enhanced the filtering by introducing a threshold. Currently the ASJC cut off is based on relative share of articles. The cut off threshold is 40%. It reduces the number of Topics attributed to an institution e.g. when an institution has relatively few papers attributed to a particular Topic.
  E.g. If Topic A has ASJC articles as follows, only the highlighted ASJCs (2701, 2703, 1703, and 1503) would be retained.

  ASJC	Number of Articles	Relative share percentage
  2701	50	50/50 * 100 = 100
  2703	40	40/50 * 100 = 80
  1703	25	25/50 * 100 = 50
  1503	20	20/50 * 100 = 40
  1705	17	17/50 * 100 = 34
  1301	5	5/50 * 100 = 10

The December 5, 2017 release of SciVal brings early Holiday cheer:

• You can now filter Topics by Scopus subject areas.
• You are now able to get a global overview of the most prominent Topics globally by filtering on ‘World’ under Countries & Groups
• It is now possible to exclude hyper-authored papers on any list of publications in SciVal, where you are able to select your own limit of 10, 50 or 100 authors.
• Following on from last month’s Ilizarov release, you can now export the underlying sources of an institution’s media mentions to see what research is being covered by the media, by what channels and in which countries.
• You can now import Researchers using ORCIDs. ORCIDs must be connected to Scopus Author IDs.
• We have added a new tab to MySciVal, so that you can now have a full overview of all the tags which you have assigned to your entities, and can edit and/or merge them with other tags.

The November 7, 2017 release of SciVal brings several great enhancements:

• You can now define researchers using their ORCID. The ORCID must be connected to a Scopus Author ID.
• View the underlying sources of your institution’s media mentions to see what research is being covered by the media
• As part of our continuous updates to the Reporting functionality, it is now easier to manage your analyses and reports with the new search & sort functionality.
• Based upon your feedback, we have made updates to the newly released Topic Prominence in Science. You are now able to identify and export the top 500 most prominent Topics for your institution.

Minor enhancements in this release:

• The ability to pick your own color for your home institution on the Benchmarking charts.
• An increased author list (500) and the possibility to export Scopus Author IDs from the Authors tab in the Trends module.
• Expanding and collapsing the selection panel, to increase the size of the content area when needed.
• An option to export Scopus subject areas and corresponding ASJC codes when viewing a list of publications.

The SciVal API offers the same feature as the SciVal UI (user interface), in that it allows you to retrieve metrics, researchers and all 8,500+ institutions in SciVal. However, the results procured are in a machine-readable format that enables software, rather than humans using the scival.com platform, to find the data. Consequently, this allows developers to write programs that automatically extract metrics from SciVal periodically, and use that data in their Institutional Repository systems, websites and for richer visualizations in tools like Tableau.

More information on the SciVal API is available at https://www.elsevier.com/solutions/scival/releases/apiopens in new tab/window

The August 15, 2017 of SciVal brings great enhancements to Reporting and the left-bar navigation design:

• You can now share your Reports with colleagues within your Institution, making it much easier for you to collaborate on Reports. There are two types of ‘sharing rights’ which can be given to your peers: view-only and edit. Please download the PowerPoint deck for screen shots and further details. Sharing Reports within your Institutionopens in new tab/window
• You can now perform a search more efficiently for an entity (Institution, Group, Researcher etc.) or select them from a drop-down menu, and drag them across to the selection panel. Please download the PowerPoint deck for screen shots and further details. Left-Bar Navigation Updateopens in new tab/window
• It is now possible to view the left-bar in My SciVal to easily add your entities to my selection and better manage them.
• Following the Einstein release, we have created new interactive guides for the Collaboration and Trends modules, and Logging in to SciVal.

The June 27, 2017 release of SciVal brings several important enhancements:

• Admins can now effortlessly share their departmental structures in SciVal with the entire institution.
• You are now able to easily export researchers and groups of researchers in My SciVal.
• We have added a 'Need help' widget to the SciVal homepage that can be personalized for your institution by your Elsevier Sales representative.
• It is now possible to drag and drop analyses within the Reporting section, to quickly add/remove/reorder analyses in a report rather than recreating it from scratch.
• We have introduced interactive guides which give you tips & tricks for navigating the Overview and the Benchmarking modules, and creating a Researcher.