SciVal Topics FAQs

We have expanded SciVal from being a purely evaluative and analytical tool to being an integral part of your research planning process. You can run a complete portfolio analysis to see which Topics your institution is currently active in, and which Topics have high momentum, those therefore more likely to be well-funded. Topics will give you insights into which researchers are active in those Topics, which Topics your peers and competitors are active in and the related Topics of which you should be aware.

A Topic is a dynamic collection of documents with a common focused intellectual interest. 

• Topics can grow or decline (year on year), be large or small, new or old and are often multidisciplinary
• There are around 95,000 Topics and 1,500 Topic Clusters in SciVal, that have been formed through a method of direct citation linking
• A publication can only belong to one Topic and one Topic Cluster
• Each week new publications are allocated to the existing Topics and Topic Clusters

Topics are ranked by Prominence, an indicator of the momentum of a particular field.

Our ground-breaking, new technology takes into consideration 95% of the articles available in Scopus from 1996 – current date and clusters them into nearly 95,000 global, unique research topics based on citation patterns.