Thomson Reuters has recently upgraded its InCites platform, which analyzes various types of scientific output to give a complete picture of, for example, a scientist’s or an institution’s activity (see Reference eReviews, LJ 1/15, for information on the company’s Journal Citation Reports database and related products from other vendors). Many institutions’ workflows still depend on the legacy version of InCites, and while that product is still available, assistance is provided to libraries that are ready to switch to the newer system.
The new version of InCites was created in response to customer requests for better ways to assess, evaluate, and discover information at various levels. Former users of the legacy system will notice that the new product cuts out several introductory screens to move to the heart of the database right away. The focus is on exploration, meaning that it is much easier for researchers to find material that they didn’t already know about—previously, the system worked best when seeking a known item. Open access information, too, has been added where it is available. Essential Science Indicators and Journal Citation Reports are presented on the same platform, and when users reach an article level metric, they can link to it if it is part of Thomson Reuters’s Web of Science database or Google Scholar.
Data on journal performance are particularly important to users, says Thomson Reuters, but “views” range from the very granular—article-level metrics are newly available—up to the institutional level. Searches reveal connections among scientists and institutions and illustrate their performance in their fields of endeavor. It’s possible for institutions to choose their own peers in the system—a school can choose an “aspirational” peer, for example, to emulate when producing academic goals.
Thomson Reuters explains that academics are not the only users; governments use the platform to search for topics that are being discussed across various scientific subfields, revealing new areas of science. Officials may then set funding accordingly. Publishers, too, can use InCites’s journal relationships function to see who their competitors are and what they are doing.
The clean, attractive InCites homepage offers several options for exploring data: people; organizations; regions; research areas; and journals, books, and conference proceedings. People, for example, provides information on 29 million authors. Users may simply browse the vast list of individuals or search by various mechanisms, including name, affiliated organization, or location; research network; research output; and times cited. Moving the mouse over a world map results in pop-up boxes showing how many “entities” call that country home.
Also on the InCites homepage are system reports on research performance, collaborations, trending technology, and institution profile. The trending technology reports, for instance, are provided in collaboration with Recorded Future, a company that offers predictive analytics, using the content of current scientific output to predict future developments.
For further details see researchanalytics.thomsonreuters.com/incites.—Henrietta Verma
