Digital Science to Adopt Relative Citation Ratio Developed at NIH

The National Institutes of Health (NIH), the world’s foremost medical research center and biomedical funding agency, has introduced the Relative Citation Ratio (RCR), a new metric to evaluate funded medical and academic research. The RCR  provides an improved indicator of the relative citation strength of a given paper, field-normalized and benchmarked against its peers. Digital Science will adopt this new article level metric of scientific influence and it will be rolled out in solutions across our portfolio.
ÜberResearch, one of our portfolio companies, has been analyzing the use of the newly generated metric with an overwhelmingly positive response from client testing. In light of this, from July 2016 they will begin to make these data available to a much larger constituency in the academic research, publishing, and science funding communities via Digital Science’s portfolio companies. Adoption will include access to the RCR for users of products from:

• Symplectic, a provider of world-leading research information management software and services, plans to make RCR available to 37% of the members of the American Association of Universities and over 80 leading research centers around the globe, via its flagship product, Elements.
• ReadCube, an innovative software developer serving researchers, publishers, academic and commercial organizations has added RCR statistics into its reader environment – touching over 15M unique researchers a year from 75+ partners including global academic publishers and educational institutions.
• Figshare, an online digital repository to help academic institutions manage, disseminate and measure the public attention of all their research outputs whilst helping them meet key funder recommendations.  Figshare provides world-leading tools to support an open culture of data sharing and collaboration.
• ÜberResearch’s Dimensions platform with more than 200 funders and over $1 trillion in historical grant awards integrated has been updated with RCR in the corresponding publication data.  This change will have particular improvement to Reviewer Identification tools, which will now include RCR scores in the over 3M disambiguated author profiles available in Dimensions.
• Altmetric, the alternative metrics company, which tracks and analyzes the online activity around scholarly literature, serving some of the world’s biggest publishers, funders and institutions around the world. (2017 implementation)

Daniel Hook, our Managing Director says of the news:

“We look forward to taking the RCR to all our global customers to assist them in using both qualitative and quantitative measures to capture the true value of their crucial work, to disrupt the primacy of citation-based metrics in favour of using a more diverse, complementary suite of metrics.”

Christian Herzog, CEO, ÜberResearch adds:  

“The RCR is a compelling metric and we have gained a deep knowledge and understanding of the value it will offer in showing the improved impact measures of research to researchers, institutions, publishers and funders.”

If you want to find out more about this news, please do get in touch.