What is the source of the data in SciVal and how are the metrics calculated?

To make SciVal as fast as possible, all probable metric combinations for all entities in SciVal are pre-calculated. This is also the case for new entities that you create. Whether or not a newly created entity can be used immediately depends upon its size.

Newly created or edited entities with less than 10,000 publications, except Groups of Institutions and Groups of Countries/Regions.

• Metrics are calculated immediately. So entities will be available immediately.

Newly created or edited entities with between 10,000 – 200,000 publications and Groups of Institutions and Groups of Countries/Regions of any size.

• Metrics calculated in one of SciVal’s daily calculation schedules and can take up to 6 hours to compute.

SciVal receives a weekly feed of data from Scopus. Every week SciVal precalculates over 300 trillion metric values - all possible metric values for all entities. This process is started every Friday morning and finishes around the following Monday afternoon (UTC time), during which time, new publications and their related metrics are allocated to each entity.

SciVal uses usage data, called view counts, from Scopus.

Usage data are generated when requests are made for online scholarly information. These data hold intelligence about the interest in research outputs, and are an important piece of the jigsaw puzzle that builds up to a complete picture of the impact of research on academia and society.

Usage data can be used for the following:

• They begin to accumulate as soon as an output is available online, and are more immediate than citation activity, so that an emerging trend or research talent may be more quickly spotted than via citation activity
• They reflect the interest of the whole research community, including undergraduate and graduate students, and researchers operating in the corporate sector, who tend not to publish and cite and who are “hidden” from citation-based metrics
• They can help to demonstrate the impact of research that is published with the expectation of being read rather than extensively cited, such as clinical and arts and humanities research
• Views Count indicates the total usage impact of an entity: how many views have this entity’s publications received in Scopus.com? The metric is the sum of Scopus abstract views, and clicks on the link to view full-text at the publisher’s website. These events cover all views from both commercial and trial customers.
• Scopus usage data are COUNTER-compliant, and are audited every year: “COUNTER (Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources) is an international initiative serving librarians, publishers and intermediaries by setting standards that facilitate the recording and reporting of online usage statistics in a consistent, credible and compatible way.
• The view count metrics are anonymized. They do not provide any information about what a particular institution’s users are viewing, and it is not possible to see the usage of a particular customer.

Views Count may be displayed in a chart or table with months and / or years:

• In SciVal, the years show the date on which items became available online; this may be different to the official publication date. They do not refer to the years in which publications were viewed.

SciVal includes all publication types in Scopus. With some metrics in Benchmarking, it's possible to filter the following publication types to include:

• All publication types
• Articles only
• Articles and conference papers
• Articles and reviews
• Articles, reviews and conference papers
• Articles, reviews, conference papers, books and book chapters
• Books and book chapters
• Conference papers only

If you do not use SciVal for 90 days, any entities you have defined (such as research areas and groups of researchers) will no longer be updated with new publications. We do this to save time during our weekly processing. Learn more about the weekly processing.

As soon as you sign in after that time your entities will be updated again in the next daily metrics processes. This can take as little as a few hours if done during the working week, or a few days if this is done over the weekend. Learn more.

Whilst you are waiting for your entities to be recalculated you can use SciVal as normal and create new entities.