Using SciVal

The University has a subscription to SciVal which is is a powerful global database that will let you do many things. Some things may be useful to research management teams for providing information to make strategic decisions, for such as 

• Analyse the progress of the University, or in fact, the progress of any university, company or organisation in the world; 

• Explore who Portsmouth, or any other university, company or organisation, are collaborating with - example;

• Identify the research strengths of Portsmouth, or any other university, company or organisation;

• Explore trends in different research areas;

• Individual academics and members of research staff may also find SciVal useful to find potential collaborators or experts in your research area;

The data in SciVal comes from Scopus, the major international publication database, indexing research articles from a wide range of subject areas. While Scopus covers a wide range of subject areas, its coverage of the arts and some humanities subjects is as strong as in other areas. 

SciVal can help you to:

Explore areas of expertise 

• Click on the 'Overview' tab

• Select Portsmouth from the left-hand menu

• Select the 'Topics' tab

Compare Portsmouth to other universities

• Click on the 'Benchmarking' tab

• Select the universities you want to compare Portsmouth from the left-hand menu

• Then select the metrics you want to make the comparisons on by clicking the x and y axis buttons if you are in the 'Chart' view, or by clicking the metric 1 and metric 2 etc buttons if you are in the 'Table' view 

• Use the Export button (top-right) if you need to download the data into an Excel spreadsheet etc

Find out who Portsmouth is collaborating with

• Click on the 'Collaboration' tab

• Choose between either the Map or the Table view

• In the left-hand menu, select the main university, organisation or business that you want to focus on (e.g. Portsmouth)

• Under where it says "Institutions collaborating with [for example] the University of Portsmouth", use the drop-down menu to select the country you want to see the collaborators from. (Or if you are in the map view, just click on the map)

• Use the Sectors drop-down menu to limit results to academic, government, corporate or medical collaborators

Find experts working in a particular area 

• Click on the 'Overview' tab

• Click on the Research Areas in the left-hand menu

• Click on the plus sign to define a new research area

• Follow the instructions on the screen

If you would like further help, please get in contact with the Research Outputs team at libraryresearch@port.ac.uk