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InCites

Use case overview

InCites is useful for 'big picture' questions about the productivity and impact of a set of researchers, an institution or organization, or a research area as expressed in the number of publications produced and the number of citations those publications receive.  See below for examples of how specific types of analysis may be generated in InCites.

Collaboration analysis

InCites can be used to analyze which researchers or organizations have collaborated by co-authoring a publication together.  This analysis uses the individual author addresses to identify their organization.  You can also generate statistics such as the number and percentage of either industry or international collaborations present.

What Kinds of Collaborations Can You Analyze In InCites?
  • Collaborations with People – analyze the collaborations of a particular author by country location, organization, research area, people and publication.
  • Collaborations with Organizations – analyze the collaborations of a particular organization by country location, organization, research area, people and publication.
  • Collaborations with Locations – analyze the collaborations of a particular country/territory by country location, organization, research area, people and publication. 

Department or group analysis

To analyze a college, department or group, you must first generate a collection of their publications.  InCites has no concept of University of Arizona's administrative or academic structure.

  • For small groups of individuals at the same institution, you can generate your collection of publications by using the filters: Person Name or ID -- just enter each individuals last name & initials or their ResearcherID or ORCID -- and Organizational Name, which will limit the collection to items written while at that institution.
  • For larger groups like an entire department or college, you will probably want to first do a search in Web of Science using Organization Enhanced and words from the Address. The results of this search can be exported as an InCites Data Set, and then used instead of the default dataset for any analysis  See the first section of the Guide to Departmental Analysis for more details.

What sorts of analysis may you want to do?

  • To compare individual researchers' metrics, you could start with a Researcher analysis.  Then, you can pin all variants of a particular author's name to the top of your list and click on Benchmarks to generate totals and averages for that researchers and compare them to the group as a whole.
  • To see which organizations or geographic regions those researchers have co-authored with, you can start with either of those analyses.
  • You can also see what research areas a particular set of researchers is strongest in or has the greatest relative impact in.
  • Finally, you can do an analysis to see where they are publishing, what sort of funding they have acknowledged, or whether they are publishing in open access venues.

Funding agency analysis

Funding agency information comes from the acknowledgements sections of publications, supplemented in some cases with data from PubMed and ResearchFish.  You can perform a Funding Agency analysis to

  • See who is funding research at a specific institution
  • See which funding agencies have co-funding research
  • See common funding agencies for a research area
  • Create a set of Web of Science records and then use these in InCites to analyze funders of specific topics.

Individual Researcher Report

One way you can use InCites is to create a more robust citation report for an individual researcher than might be created in other products, like Web of Science.  This is because InCites will allow you to calculate citation metrics relatively to other researchers in the same broad research area (using the Category Normalized Citation Impact) or other authors in the same journal (using the Journal Normalized Citation Impact).  This avoids the common pitfall of using a measurement about a journal (like a Journal Impact Factor) to describe the individual works of a researcher.

To do this type of report:

  1. Go to the Analyze > Researcher section of InCites

  2. Using the Filters on the left, choose By Attributes > Person Name or ID to enter either alternate forms of their name (Last, First) or a ResearcherID or ORCID associated with them.

    • If using a name search, be sure to use Last Name, First Initial (or First Name) to find all of the ways the name may be entered as an author.

    • Records since 2008 will have institutions affiliated with each name variant so you can look for items associated with that name at a current or previous organization.  Records with n/a as the affiliation could be from any organization or may be a mix of same-named authors from multiple organizations.

    • You can narrow down your selection for common names by also selecting Affiliated organizations and entering any organization the researcher may have been affiliated with.   This will restrict your search to items published since 2008.

  3. To combine and total across all of the researcher's publications, click the box next to each relevant name variation and Pin to Top.  Then, click on Baseline and choose Baseline for Pinned Items.

  4. Click on the gear at the top left of the listing to add columns of metrics you would like to see.  Some suggested metrics include:

    • Category Normalized Citation Impact

    • Journal Normalized Citation Impact

    • h-index

    • etc.

  5. You can click on the Number of Web of Science Documents for the Baseline for all Pinned Items to see a report of the individual's publication.  This will give you a better idea of how their articles are performing relative to others in the journal or research field.

Institutional analysis & identifying peers

InCites can be used to compare your institution's output to a pre-selected group of peer institutions, or to a group of institutions defined by geography (e.g. same state or country) or other characteristics.   The University of Toledo Office of Institutional Research maintains a list of peer institutions of various types. These videos and guides provide the basics of institutional comparisons.

Open access analysis

InCites can help you analyze who is publishing in Open Access journals, as well as what journals they are publishing in.