As a rising number of institutions shift their focus towards collaborative relationships to secure funding in a more competitive research landscape, analyzing current and potential partners has become increasingly important. To address this growing need, Elsevier, a world-leading provider of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, has now launched a new enhancement to SciVal Spotlight: an integrated collaboration analysis enabling institutional decision makers to identify and evaluate partnerships at an institutional and author level.
This new enhancement allows users to identify and assess existing and potential partner institutions related to the current research competencies. Further, it enables the evaluation of existing partnerships by combined article output among contributing institutions and displays collaboration partners in particular research strengths. Ultimately, institutional decision makers can now find or evaluate existing and potential partners by uncovering with whom they are collaborating, with whom they are sharing and not sharing competencies, and who is active within competencies but is not yet a partner.
“Working with academic and governmental research advisors around the globe, we uncovered a growing demand for data driven methods to evaluate and enhance the strategic collaborative partnerships vital to securing competitive funding and increasing overall research excellence,” explained Jay Katzen, Managing Director of Elsevier Academic and Government Markets. “As part of our customer-centric approach, we work closely with development partners and customers to solicit feedback and leverage our agile development methodology to ensure we can rapidly address and improve our SciVal suite based on this feedback.”
The visual presentation of the collaboration landscape based on user selected criteria can be displayed in three ways:
- Map: Geographical distribution of both existing and/or potential collaboration partners plotted on a world map, including an indication of the research intensity with the inquiring institution
- Table : Ranking of both existing and potential collaboration partners based on the research intensity with the inquiring institution
- Details: Provides an overview of publications, authors, and competencies of the partnering or candidate institution
For more information on SciVal Spotlight, please visit 
www.info.scival.com.
