11 March 2020: Percentage change feature enhanced to help monitor research trends within a specific field or organisation
Published: Wed 11 Mar 2020
New percentage change views for co-occurring concepts help monitor the growth and decline of research output
Within Inspec Analytics, you can now see the percentage changes for co-occurring subject classifications and co-occurring control terms - topics associated with a selected subject. This can help researchers understand specific trends within a subject, such as which theories or techniques are trending upwards, which equations they should familiarise themselves with or which chemical substances are becoming more relevant within a subject area.
For example, by exploring co-occurring controlled terms within the subject “elemental semiconductors” you can filter by the term “lasers” to see the types of lasers are commonly discussed in research on this topic. Now, as well as seeing the number of articles for each type of laser, you can also see how quickly each is increasing or decreasing in research output. Re-ordering your results by ascending or descending percentage change will reveal which types of lasers are becoming more or less significant within the field. Select the ‘% change’ heading at the top of the column to re-order your results.
New percentage change for organisations publishing on a concept
Percentage changes have also been applied to organisations for each concept so that you can now see which organisations are growing or declining in research output within specific subjects.
For example, if you search for the classification code ‘A8610’ (energy resources and fuel) and explore the list of organisations publishing on this subject, you can see that Tsinghua University has published the most articles, followed by North China Electric Power University. However, by reordering your results by the percentage change column, you can see that the University of Indonesia has had the largest increase in research output in this area followed by Hefei University of Technology. This new information can provide additional context for an organisation’s research strategy, which can help you with benchmarking your own organisation and finding collaboration opportunities.
