HARC: Helpful Academic Researchers Companion

Topics of Prominence

• A Topic is a collection of documents with a common intellectual interest
• Topics are ranked by Prominence, an indicator of the momentum of a particular field - topics can be growing or declining in momentum
• Topics are based on clustering the citation network of 95% of Scopus content (articles published since 1996)
• Prominence is calculated using very recent citations, Scopus views and CiteScore values
• Prominence does not signify 'Importance', although some Topics may be both prominent and important, which topics are active, which researchers are active in those topics, what are the related topics
• click here for more information

Types of Topics of Prominence

• are available for an institution, a topic, a researcher or group of researchers

Researchers can use Topic Prominence to:

• show who else is active and publishing research in a similar Topic to mine, whom I could partner and co-author with?
• what are some related Topics adjacent to mine with a lot of momentum, where I could focus my research attention?
• which are the Topics with high momentum, that are likely to be well-funded and thus have higher grant success rates?
   

Research managers can use Topic Prominence to:

• find the pockets of well-funded research in an institutions current research portfolio
• discover who the top performing researchers and upcoming research active in a particular research field, which has a lot of momentum
• show an institutions's research momentum in a specific Topic
• which high or forward momentum Topics peers and competitors are active in
   

What Topics are there ?

• Scival provides over 96,000 global, unique research topics, with more being added each year
• Define your own topic
• define own topic in SciVal or
• alternatively, do a topic search in Scopus, click on an interesting citation from the results list, and the Topic of Prominence of this article will display. Click on the Topic link to see it in greater detail in SciVal.

To discover an Institution's Topics of Prominence

• click on the Overview Module

• select an institution from the Left hand panel

• click on Topics in the ribbon

• in Browse Topics

  • Wheel view displays the Topics of Prominence as graduated bubbles, highlighting related Topics, and Topics of Prominence for that institution.

    • topics are shown with a circle

    • the topics around the edge are more focused around a subject area while those further away from the edge are more multidisciplinary

    • larger bubbles indicate more momentum
       

  • Table view allows you to view all of the institutions main Topics, number of publications, share (increasing or decreasing), Field-Weighted Citation Impact, prominence percentile

More information from https://www.elsevier.com/solutions/scival/releases/topic-prominence-in-science

Overview of a Single Topic of Prominence
... to discover high activity in that topic by Institutions, Countries, Authors, Scopus sources & Keyphrases

• click on Trends Module

• select Topics and Research Areas in the Left hand panel

• click on + Add Topics and Research Areas

• click on Advanced Topic Search

• click on tick box to select the Topic ... then move your cursor to the right to click on "Add this entity to the entity selection panel"
  

• the selected topic will now appear on the left hand panel

• click on a selected topic in the panel to view Topics of Prominence to display high activity by Summary, Institutions, Countries, Authors and Keywords

Overview of an Author's Topics of Prominence
... to discover an author's high activity in that topic

• click on the Overview Module

• click on Researchers and Groups? select an author (left panel)

• once the author's details are displaying

• click on Topics

• choose either the Table or wheel view

• view the author's main topics and which ones are more prominent

Keyphrases

SciVal can be used to find a topic's top 50 keyhrases by relevence, based on the publications around that topic or subject area are condensed into a wordcloud or a chart - identifying which phrases are growing or declining in usage

• click on Trends Module
• select either a Topic or a Research Area
• click on Keyphrases

The Citation Report within the Web of Science

The Citation Report provides aggregate citation statistics for a set of search results.

• these statistics include the total number of results found in a search
• the total number of times all records have been cited
• the average number of times a record has been cited, and more

Find TRENDS topic by using CITATION REPORT

The Citation Report in Web of Science displays articles which have attracted the most citations.

1. Search for your topic

2. View your results list and modify your search keywords if necessary

3. Click on Create Citation Report

4. Records on the Results page are sorted by Times Cited -- highest to lowest by default OR by date.

The image below shows:

• Total  Publications by date: what is the publication trend?
• h-index: how highly cited is the average paper?
• Sum of Times Cited per Year: what is the citation trend? Are citations for the topic increasing, sharply increasing, decreasing, flattening out?

Information above is also available in a table format.