McGill hosts 2019 North American SciVal User Group Meeting

The meeting aimed to help SciVal users in North America take full advantage of SciVal’s features and functionality by sharing and learning about best practices from other users face-to-face

On October 10 and 11, 2019, McGill hosted the North American SciVal user group meeting on campus for users of the bibliometric tool. The purpose of the meeting was to help SciVal users in North America to take full advantage of SciVal’s features and functionality by sharing best practices and being inspired by how other users and institutions are using the tool.

McGill welcomed 50 attendees to the meeting, including current users from the Canadian Space Agency, Hydro Quebec, University of Kentucky, Drexel University, University of Toronto, York University, University of Waterloo, University of Windsor, University of California, and the National Research Council, as well as members of the SciVal product team. The topics of focus included learning about upcoming and future enhancements to SciVal, sharing feedback, and understanding how to use metrics responsibly for measuring research impact. Attendees enjoyed a special session on Topics of Prominence in Science, a new addition to SciVal which provides unique insight into identifying new, emerging research trends.

Nancy Ross, Associate Vice-Principal (Research and Innovation), delivered opening remarks and highlighted how SciVal can contribute to supporting the University’s research goals. Most recently, bibliometric data gleaned from SciVal informed McGill’s 2018 Annual Report on Research and Innovation, and in the future, McGill will look to developing key performance indicators using this data.

Victor Arshad, Analyst, and Candace Miller, Senior Analyst (Research Data), from the Office of the Vice-Principal (Research and Innovation) presented on behalf of McGill. They took the opportunity to communicate how McGill utilizes SciVal by sharing use cases, best practices and also by providing tips on how to use the bibliometric tool in an efficient and successful way.

”SciVal has only been in use at McGill since December 2018, so this user group meeting was a great opportunity to learn how we can best use the tool from more established users,” said Miller.

About SciVal

McGill has acquired an institution-wide licence for Elsevier’s SciVal for faculty members, students and staff. SciVal is an on-line bibliometric tool based on the Scopus database that offers research metrics such as publication and citation data from over 10,000 research institutions and their associated researchers from 230 regions and nations worldwide. The tool gives users access to 46 million publication records, from 1996 to today, from over 21,000 journals.

High-quality bibliometric data, one of many ways to measure research output, has become critical for multiple stakeholders across the McGill community and for multiple types of questions and uses, such as identifying research strengths through benchmarking, providing supporting data for grant applications, and identifying opportunities for collaborations. Using advanced data analytics, SciVal processes large amounts of data to generate uniquely tailored reports, which include visualizations such as charts, graphs and tables.

For more information, please visit McGill’s SciVal webpage.

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