“Dimensions provides a very easy to use and powerful package for interdisciplinary research topic analysis.”
John de Mello, Head of Nano at Norwegian University of Science & Technology
When John joined NTNU in September 2018, he was tasked with getting a handle on the breadth of nanoscience and nanotechnology-related research being conducted at the university. John says: “ At that stage, there were no detailed records within the university’s three campuses on the topic.”
John was asked to not only map the nano activity but figure out the university’s respective research strengths and weaknesses in the area. John decided to take a bibliometric approach and was soon drawn to the Dimensions API because of the flexibility it offered to build and run highly customized queries.
Using the Dimensions API, John wanted to answer the following questions about NTNU and nanoscience:
- Who is working in nanoscience?
- What areas are they currently working in?
- What areas are they not covering? Who are their current collaborators?
- Who should they consider collaborating with?
- Where is NTNU getting its nanoscience funding from?
- Are there other funding opportunities?
- What has NTNU published in nanoscience in the last year/ last 5 years?
- What nanoscience-related patents has it filed?
Using the Dimensions API to find nano publications published by NTNU in 2018
In this example, John was looking for all 2018 publications affiliated to NTNU that contained the keyword “nano” in the title, abstract or full text. He wanted to know:
- Publication type
- Citation numbers and Altmetric score
- Authors
- Funders
- Open Access status
He also wanted to obtain the publication DOIs so that he had a consistent identifier to find and acquire the resulting papers.
John found that Dimensions did a very good job of collating all the nano-related publications authored by NTNU researchers. Dimensions even found papers NTNU was previously unaware of.
John liked the following aspects of Dimensions:
- Easy to use API
- Integration of publication data with funding and patent data
- Integrated Altmetric data to show wider impact of work
- Comprehensive documentation: in little more than a day, John was able to extract the kind of information he wanted
- Good technical support: for technical questions same day solutions were provided
“The Dimensions API comes with great documentation and technical support.”
Overall, John found Dimensions a very easy to use and powerful package for interdisciplinary research topic analysis.
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