The following is a simplified example of using InCites for research area benchmarking. When performing your own analysis consider using multiple indicators, adding additional filters like relevant document types, and recognizing potential limitations of the indicators you have included.
We'll start with a short video of our analysis, from start to finish. Our goal was to find citation topics that our university was strong in, while removing from the analysis subject areas we have not published much in while at the same time removing papers with more than 30 authors.
To learn more about each step of this process, continue reading below.
Set up your analysis
When setting up an analysis for research benchmarking, it’s essential to first determine what you want to measure and compare. Essentially, this means deciding whether your focus will be on evaluating your entire institution (and its research areas as a whole) or whether you'll hone in on a specific research field or area within your institution and compare that with other institutions.
Choose analysis
In our case, we will opt for the Research Areas analysis and we will analyze which micro citation topics we are strong in.
Alternatively, if your goal is to compare your entire institution to others, you would choose the Organizations analysis. This will structure your report around the institutions themselves as the primary unit of comparison, with all other metrics or indicators (such as publications, citations, etc.) being analyzed relative to those institutions.
Research Area: the schemas
Under "Research Area," users can choose a schema to group results by subject. A common option is Web of Science, which includes the 254 Web of Science categories and is the default choice.
While benchmarking research areas, other popular options are the UN Sustainable Development Goals schema and Web of Science Citation Topics schema. In our case we will analyze Citation Topics.
Select time period
InCites dataset is updated on a monthly basis. The default is set to the last 5 complete years. The system will always indicate when it was last updated and the date of the indexed content.
Data sources
ESCI - Emerging Sources Citation Index
The ESCI is a Core Collection index that includes journals that have been evaluated for coverage and met our quality standards.
Users can choose to include or exclude ESCI data in their analysis when working with InCites or Web of Science data, though it’s excluded by default. It’s recommended to include ESCI data as it expands the range of sources in your analysis. Not including it will affect the numbers of both documents and citations in your result set. Some rankings do not include ESCI data at this time.
Filters
Filters allow us to reduce our data set so that we're only analyzing the documents that are relevant to us. Our goal for this exercise is to analyze our specific organization (University of Belgrade), and we want to include citation topics where we've published more than 20 papers and where there are no more than 30 authors on the paper. Other considerations such as Document Type, Open Access status, Author Position, and Top % Documents are other popular filter options.
Organization name
The Organization name filter in InCites allows users to refine their search results based on specific institutions or organizations. Each name is a unified organization combining address variants into a single entry. An Affiliation can also be a parent or child to another entry.
Web of Science Documents
As a filter, Web of Science Documents can be used to set a minimum or maximum number of items to be included in the analysis. Setting a minimum can help minimize outliers in results. As an example, an institution may have the highest CNCI in the Web of Science category of Theater, due to a higher than average Times Cited count. However, if they have only published 2 articles in this category it is not the primary focus of their institution. Setting a minimum threshold can remove this result and put the focus back on categories where there is more than an insignificant publication history.
As an indicator, the Web of Science Documents column will show the number of documents matching the criteria in the dataset with filters applied. Clicking on the number will take the user to a detailed view, listing each Web of Science document. This table can be exported up to a maximum of 50,000 records.
Authors per Document
Authors per Document allows for the ability to filter documents based on the number of authors listed on the paper. This can be useful, for instance, when analyzing collaborations if you do not want to include papers where there are hundreds or even thousands of authors. Single authorship papers can easily be analyzed in this way as well.
Type a number or adjust the slider to limit the results by number of authors per document. Set a minimum and maximum threshold. The results will only include documents with a count of authors between the minimum and maximum thresholds.
Indicators
InCites offers a variety of indicators to help analyze research performance and impact. Selecting an indicator adds a column to your analysis table. You can add indicators from the left-side menu, or right above the table in your analysis.
For this exercise, our goal is to find which micro citation topics we are strong in, and will use Citation Normalized Citation Impact as the indicator to measure this. After using the filters to get to our data, we will then sort by CNCI and our analysis will be complete. We now have a data table showing us the micro citation topics that our university has had the most impact in, published in the last 5 years.
Learn more about CNCI and why this is such a powerful metric:
CNCI
CNCI (Category Normalized Citation Impact) is the ratio of citations a group of papers receives compared to the average citations for papers of the same age, type, and subject area. CNCI adjusts for differences in citation rates based on a paper’s age, type, and subject area, allowing for fairer comparisons between papers. It benchmarks an output against similar research globally.
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Downloading, saving & sharing
InCites offers users a few options for saving and exporting reports.
- Export reports as Excel or CSV files, which allows for easy offline access and further data manipulation in spreadsheet programs.
- Save reports by adding them to a personal folder, making it easy to organize and revisit key analyses at any time.
- Share directly with others via email, enabling collaboration and visibility among team members or stakeholders without requiring them to re-create the report.