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SciVal Database

Last updated on June 23, 2021 2 min read Find Collaborators - SciVal Database

SciVal is an excellent tool for both beginners and advanced users seeking greater access to bibliometric data. SciVal is power by the SCOPUS database, an internationally recognized publication database used by THE and QS world university rankings.

Users may contact the Office of Research at research@bu.edu for support.

Overview

SciVal allows you to:

  • Obtain a wide range of bibliometrics to evaluate research at the individual, group, or institution level
  • Evaluate bibliometric data over time to examine trends in the research landscape
  • Identify potential collaborators using a variety of methods
  • Analyze research using custom searches and groups or utilize a wide variety or pre-configured options
  • Identify emerging research themes

What’s Included

SciVal contains a database populated by publication data taken from the Elsevier Scopus database. The information contained in the publications (author, institution, and so on) is then used to create the other portions of the database. SciVal calculates a number of useful comparative metrics from the citation and publication data such as FWCI, h-index, h5-index, citations per publication, % publications in the top citation percentiles, % publications in top journals, and many others. These provide excellent comparison points for both institutions and individuals. SciVal also performs a bigram keyword analysis of all publications and uses the results in two ways. First, it allows for keyword based searches. Second, SciVal uses it to create pre-made topics and topic clusters for analysis.

SciVal also contains information on media mentions, patents, and funding. The media mentions portion of the site is useful and additionally provides information about the mention (i.e. for an article in the newspaper it will provide a citation for the article). Media data in SciVal is only available at the institutional level. The patent information is somewhat limited, but can be useful, especially as a comparative metric. Funding data in SciVal is quite narrow in scope, as it only includes a few funding sources. Domestically it gives a serviceable view of federal funding ONLY. Internationally, it should not be used as it only includes a few UK and Australia based funders. For example, SciVal will indicate that the largest Chinese universities are only receiving a few thousand dollars in funding.

SciVal has the option to create custom research areas, groups, and searches, but also comes with a wide range of pre-computed groupings. These include topics (clusters of interrelated papers), topic clusters (related clusters of predetermined topics), research areas (common search queries and areas of interest), institutional groups (like the AAU), and geographic groups (such as North America or the G20).

Creating an Account

  1. Navigate to https://scival.com/landing
  2. Click “Create Account” in the top right corner
  3. Click “Sign in via your institution”
  4. Search for/Select Boston University
  5. Click “Access through Boston University”

Note: Access must come via bu.edu email address only. Access cannot be provided for personal email accounts.

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