Digital Research Yearbook – Profiling Research Across UK Universities

Today we have released an extensive new directory profiling the research activity of every UK university and college that receives core research funding from one of the Higher Education Funding Councils.

The Digital Research Yearbook brings together and visualises a wealth of data on funding inputs, research activity and research outcomes across the UK higher education research base.  It provides a suite of reference points for institutional senior management, funders and overseas institutions to shed light on research activity in a way that hasn’t been done before; to reveal a more timely, rounded and balanced picture for research management than retrospective bibliometric analysis in a ready-reference and highly accessible format.

The Digital Research Yearbook is a modern guide to the research environment in the UK, providing a helpful reference point for those who need a broad understanding of the UK landscape for strategic, policy or collaborative purposes.  Key analyses include:

• A double page spread of innovative visualisations* presents key data about the research that an institution carries out.
• Funding, capacity, publication, collaboration, ORCID and Altmetric data and much more.
• Core information on each institution with leadership and contacts for research and commercial activity, providing a route to senior managers and research offices.
• Unique sector group benchmarking – see where each institutions stands amongst comparable institutions, and easily compare across institution.
• Detailed explanation on methodology and interpretation.
• Key data-driven snippets that highlight important insights about each institution’s performance

The Digital Research Yearbook draws upon data from across the portfolio companies of Digital Science and from valuable external sources:

• The Dimensions database of $1+ trillion of research funding data from 250  research funders from around the globe.
• Policy, News and social media attention data from Altmetric.
• The ORCID indicator, shows what proportion of researchers at each profiled institution have registered an ORCID account and specified their current affiliation with the institution.
• The Nature Index, published by Nature Research, part of Springer Nature, provides data about the author affiliations of research articles in 68 high-quality journals, including the number of articles (article count) authors from a country or institution have published. It also tracks domestic and international collaborations.
• The Open Archive initiative indicator shows the average number of items per researcher, including datasets, theses, journal articles or grant proposals deposited.

*For example: The Digital Science BrainScans are based on an analysis of the text content of research projects in the Dimensions grant database and of impact case studies in the REF2014 UK national research assessment database,  revealing the extent of interdisciplinary links in an institution’s research:

Universities and higher education colleges are responsible for a high proportion of basic, innovative research and train most of the highly qualified people who underpin any knowledge-based economy.

Commenting on the release of the Digital Research Yearbook, Jonathan Adams, Chief Scientist at Digital Science, said:

‘The Digital Research Yearbook brings together the first holistic overview of  research activity in a visual and engaging way that makes it an indispensable guide to the environment in which research is done in the UK. The profiles of research input, capacity and outcomes for these institutions enable better analysis and planning. They are based on a wide range of management analyses and indicators around the whole research cycle instead of of the narrow focus of traditional citation impact metrics; they capture today’s research, not data on historical activity.’

Consultant Data Scientist, Martin Szomszor added:

‘The Digital Research Yearbook taps into the emerging need for data-driven decision making. Instead of fixed questions and answers, the Digital Research Yearbook empowers the reader by using a broad range of data sources and novel visualisations, to unearth new and current insights.’

The Digital Research Yearbook will be published in both print and e-book formats and available online at www.digital-science.com/yearbook/. We’ll share information online using #DigitalResearchYearbook.