Release notes

April 15, 2021

March 18, 2021

March 3, 2021

March 1, 2021

February 17, 2021

January 18, 2021

December 18, 2020

• Update of the publication year definition: We are no longer prioritising print dates but instead trying to identify the date at which the version of record first became available. Learn more

•  New journal lists available as filters: UGC-CARE Group I & II; China Journal Initiative A, B, C as well as J-STAGE.
• Enhanced affiliation identification as well as funder and grant identification.

December 09, 2020

• There is a new option available at the top of the patent result list to group patents by family. If enabled it returns the most relevant document per family (simply patent family). The number at the very top with the total number of patents shows either the number of documents or the number of families – depending on whether “Group by family” is enabled or not. The filters and Analytical views always operate on the document level. 
• We also show a number of additional fields on the patent result list: Patent ID, Publication date, Filed date, Priority date, and the Number of documents in the same patent family.

November 25, 2020

• For an increasing number of publications Dimensions has the title and abstract in both english and the original language. We now introduced a toggle on the publication details pages which allows you to see the original language. See here for an example.

November 10, 2020

• In the advanced search tool to refine queries with co-occurring concepts we automatically grey out all concepts which are already used in the query box. This makes it easier to identify the relevant concepts from the concept panel .
• The publication details pages in the free version of Dimensions includes a “funded by” section with the funders supporting the research. The section includes all identified funders and can go beyond the funders in the “supporting grants” section in cases where the funder in general was identified but no specific grant.

October 28, 2020

• Improvements on the advanced search tool to refine queries with co-occurring terms. Apart from usability improvements, it is now possible to add concepts with boolean AND, OR and NOT. To support the user in building functional queries we automatically add parentheses for boolean nesting – this feature is optional and can be switched off if not needed.
• The relevance sorting of search results has been improved for cases where the exact spelling matters e.g. “WHO report” with uppercase characters.
• Study sites / locations have been added to the clinical trials details pages.

October 14, 2020

• Improved mobile usability of researcher details pages
• Stability improvements and bug fixes

September 30, 2020

• Improved usability of document details pages on mobile devices.
• The timeline and heatmap visualizations are now also available for the ‘Places’ Analytical view in Dimensions Analytics.

September 11, 2020

• You can now download basic publication metadata in RIS / BibTeX format for further use in a reference managers such as ReadCube Papers or Zotero. With each download you can export up to 500 records.
• Dimensions details pages show you how research is connected to other elements in the database, such as supporting grants or publications resulting from a grant, citing or cited publications, linked clinical trials and much more.
  You will now see a “Show all” link on details pages next to the section with the linked documents. This opens all linked documents as a result list where you can easily aggregate, export and analyse the data, or apply further filters. Here is a good example – Note: The “Show all” links are available when you have access to the respective content type in Dimensions.

September 03, 2020

• Publication exports now include additional columns with publication abstracts, acknowledgments and aw affiliations.
• The “export for bibliometric mapping” includes abstracts which allows you to create term co-occurrence maps with VOSviewer

August 18, 2020

• We added the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) categories to the dataset content type. Users can now filter for datasets related to SDGs, see the applicable SDGs on the dataset details page, analyze the distribution of datasets per SDG with the Analytical views, or make use of SDGs in the export.
• After requesting an export we now show the status of this export as “in progress” in the export center.

August 05, 2020

• Bug fixes and performance improvements

July 22, 2020

• MeSH terms from clinicaltrials.gov have been added to Clinical Trial detail pages, see example here
• Accessibility improvements: Improvements to the keyboard navigation, changes to the embedding of our graphics and other metadata

• Bug fixes

July 08, 2020

• The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) categories have been added to the grants content type. With access to the grants content you can filter for grants related to specific SDGs, see the applicable SDGs on the grant details page, analyze the distribution of grants per SDG with the Analytical views, or make use of SDGs in the grant exports.
• We added a new feature to Dimensions Analytics which allows you to refine a keyword search with relevant, co-occurring keywords and phrases. Read more.
• Researcher details pages now include a timeline chart which plots the number publications, citations, active grants, patents, datasets and active clinical trials over time. This provides you with an overview of a researcher’s output, income and impact over time. The chart is available in all versions of Dimensions. See an example here.

June 23, 2020

• This release includes fixes for a couple of issues reported by users.

June 10, 2020

• In this release we focused on some important bug fixes and accesibility issues as well as on improvements of the application performance.

May 28, 2020

• When exporting data from an Analytical View (available in Dimensions Analytics) you now get an additional column with the IDs for the exported 1) source titles, 2) funders and 3) research organizations. This makes the data easier to use in further analysis.
• When adding a researcher to a timeline chart you will now also see the (algorithmically determined) current affiliation of the suggested researchers. This makes it easier to identify the right researcher for the analysis in the chart.

May 11, 2020

• We introduced researcher details pages which provide an overview of a researcher’s output, information about the co-authors network, the funding bodies supporting a researchers work, information on the researcher’s experience and education (sourced from ORCiD), and more. Here an example profile of the molecular biologist and Nobel laureate Carol Widney Greider. The page for any researcher in Dimensions can be accessed when you search for a researcher and click the “View Profile” button in the researcher’s summary box on top of the result list.
• We made some improvements related to exporting data from Dimensions: you can now chose the export format without going into the settings of your user account, it is possible to opt-out from email notifications, and export for bibliometric mapping is available as an option for individually selected sets of publications.
• Proximity search has been enabled for users of Dimensions Plus – proximity search is a way to search for documents where two or more terms occur within a specified distance.

April 22, 2020

• All users of Dimensions can now create email alerts. Dimensions Plus users can create alerts for both publications and grants – Free users for publications. Email alerts for other content types are planned for later this year.
• With Dimensions Analytics it is now possible to share groups within the user organization so that all users from the same organization can access and use them as any other filter in Dimensions. This can be all kinds of groups such as groups of journals, organizations, or researchers.
• Dimensions users can download result lists as xlsx and csv – with download limits between 500 and 50K per export, depending on the product version. A new feature allow users to select up to 500 individual items from a result list and export them in the desired format. This feature is available in all product versions.
• Chinese Yuan (CNY) available as a currency option for grants: We obtain grant funding amounts in their original currencies and convert them in the background so that users can decide which currency they want to use in Dimensions. With the addition of the Chinese Yuan (CNY) we now support nine different currencies.

March 31, 2020

• Dimensions has introduced a filter for the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The filter is available for publications content in all product versions – including the free version of Dimensions. SDGs can provide insights on what research contributes to underpin the global challenges and how research can help to tackle the challenges. It furthermore provides research institutions with an overview of how they are contributing to the implementation of the SDGs.

March 19, 2020

• Dimensions now shows the first two lines of the abstract / summary on the result lists. The preview is available for publications, datasets, grants, clinical trials. The preview mode is enabled per default and can be disabled with the checkbox at the top of the result list.
• We implemented a cookie management system which allows users to better control what type of cookies can be used by Dimensions .

February 19, 2020

• A new filter “Groups” has been introduced in Dimensions Analytics where you can find My Groups, Funder Groups and a new filter with an initial selection of Research Organization Groups. Click ‘Browse’ to get more details about the group definitions, to download the definitions, or to copy a group to My Groups where you can edit them further.
• The Clinical trial details pages now include a few new metadata fields: Brief title, Acronym, and Intervention and they have also been added to the xlsx/csv export file.
• Datasets available via API: The Analytics API now includes more than 30 fields that can be used to search dataset records, as well as their links to publications, grants, organizations and researchers.

January 28, 2020

• Dimensions now integrates datasets as a new content type. The datasets will be available to all users – including those using the free version of Dimensions. The initial release includes ~1.5 million datasets from figshare, repositories hosted by figshare, Dryad, Pangaea, Mendeley Data and Zenodo. Read our blog post

December 17, 2019

• Units of Assessments available for grants: Units of Assessment (UoA) – a classification scheme used by the Research Excellence Framework 2021 (REF) – has been introduced for publications with version 3.32. The same is now available for the grants, i.e. you can filter grants by UoA, analyse them using the Analytical Views, and UoAs are shown on grant details pages. UoA is available for users of Dimensions Analytics.
• “Go back” button on details pages: If you open a details page you will now see a ‘go back’ button at the top of the page. This will always bring you back to the results from where you entered the page – even if you already moved on to linked documents of the first item. 
• Download My Group definitions as CSV: As a user of Dimensions Analytics you can now download the definitions of your personal ‘My groups’. Simply go to Browse My Groups, click “Export group definitions” and you will receive a csv file with group name, the included entities and the entity values/IDs. This is especially useful if you would like to create and use the same group definitions in the API.
• We implemented further accessibility improvements to make Dimensions more accessible to people with disabilities, such as improved contrast between links and text, improved page titles for screen readers, improved tab navigation.

November 18, 2019

• The recently introduced feature in Dimensions Analytics to filter for researchers affiliated with a specific organization / location has now been enabled for patents.
• Improvements to the stability of the timeline charts when changing the applied filters and to the reliability of the OpenURL link resolver.
• We are very happy to announce that the latest Analytics API release includes the capability of searching GRID – the Global Research Identifiers Database – as well as matching free-text affiliation strings against it, so it will return valid GRID identifiers. Read more

November 07, 2019

• Dimensions is now identifying researchers in the patent content type. You can search for researcher in patents using the filter on the left-hand side and analyse them with the researcher Analytical View. More than 275 thousand researcher profiles are currently linked to patents.
• When searching for research organizations (or their locations) you will now get an additional filter in the Researcher Analytical View which allows you to only see researchers currently affiliated with the selected research organization or location. Available in Dimensions Analytics.
• The search box auto-expands and will show up to 15 rows of a query. When using a query which is longer than just one line of text, this makes it much easier to review and edit what you put in the search box.
• For more than 800k arXiv items we already show a link to the published version of the preprint on the details page. With this release we now also show the link from the published version to the arXiv preprint.

October 08, 2019

• We implemented Units of Assessment (UoA) as a new categorization system for publications in Dimensions. UoA is a classification scheme used by the Research Excellence Framework 2021 (REF) for assessing the quality of research in UK Higher Education Institutions. We have implemented this system using automated allocation of UoA codes to documents in Dimensions based on category definitions defined by machine learning. The UoA categories are available in Dimensions Analytics.
• After enabling the time range selection for all Overview charts in the last release you can now also define the time range for all other Timeline charts. You can go back in time up to 50 years or plot the future activity in terms of grants and clinical trials.
• In the Analytical Views panel in Dimensions you can download a csv / xlsx files with up to 500 entities such as researchers, source titles, funders etc. including the selected indicators. With this release we added an additional column to the export of the Researcher view which includes the Dimensions researcher IDs.

September 23, 2019

• The time range in Overview charts can now be defined by the user and the data for up to 50 years can be plotted. This allows you to investigate trends over a larger time span, including future years for grants and clinical trials.
• We added arXiv publications to Dimensions. When an arXiv preprint has already been published in another source title, we show this information on the publication details page under “Resulting publication”. Links to the arXiv record and the PDF full text can be found on all arXiv details pages.
• When searching for a researcher name using the “more” field we now also return the name of a researcher’s current affiliation. Especially when searching for more common names this change makes it easier to add the correct researchers to your query. The current affiliation is automatically assigned to researcher profiles based on the organizations used in recent publications and grants.

August 26, 2019

• We improved the way to present indicators in the Analytical Views for Publications and also added several new indicators. Per default you will now see three columns: 1) Publications, 2) total number of citations, and 3) average number of citations. Depending on the Dimensions version you are using you can select other indicator families to analyse the academic impact or Altmetric attention. The indicators shown in the collapsed Analytical View have been replaced by total and average number of citations (instead of average RCR and FCR).
• Two new download options for the charts in Dimensions have been added: XLSX and CSV. This is especially useful when you want to recreate a chart in Excel or use another chart type which is not supported in Dimensions.
• The bar chart visualization which was only available for Grants is now also available for all other content types. 
• There is a new section available on publications details pages where the original acknowledgements /funding text is shown. This gives you additional transparency about how the research has been funded.

August 07, 2019

• Two new filters for the patents added: 1) Priority year and 2) Filed year. Priority year is the filing year of the earliest application of which priority is claimed, Filed year is the year when a patent application is first filed at a patent office. Both are important dates in the history of a patent. 
• Filter for Grant status and Clinical Trial status added: These filters allow you to filter by grants and clinical trials which a) are finished, b) have not started yet, c) are ongoing, and d) which have an unknown status (no start date / end date available). These filters not only allow you to quickly select e.g. grants which have not started yet – they are also more precise since they are calculated based on the day when the grant / clinical trial starts and ends.
• We implemented a new methodology to assign Fields of Research (FOR) categories to publications. The new methodology is improving both the precision and recall of the FOR categorization.
• The Field Citation Ratio (FCR) is now based on the improved Fields of Research categories (see above). The FCR values will change slightly due to the larger number of categorized publications.
• For all content types Dimensions now provides both the 4-digit and the respective 2-digit codes in the filter, the analytical views, and on the details pages. This means that you can now build queries with the broader 2-digit FOR codes and from the comparison charts you can directly add a 2-digit FOR code to the query.
• When selecting a more entities from a filter using the type-ahead, all selected entities are now added to the top of the filter section, i.e. when selecting more than 10 entities to add them to a group or a query it is now much easier to review and refine your selection before doing the next step.
• On all details pages we now show the normalized name of all research organizations when they have been disambiguated. In addition to this we show a tooltip with the “original address” when the normalized name is different from the name we got from the original metadata. This change brings more consistency in the way we display resolved organization names and the tooltips ensure transparency of the underlying data.

July 10, 2019

• Publication type “Books” renamed to “Edited books”
• Add link from proceeding details page to proceeding source title 

June 24, 2019

• Comparison chart – number of grants added as an option to analyze research categories per organization
• New indicator available in Analytical View ‘Overview’: “Publications with citations”
• Significant performance improvements for Analytical Views 

May 29, 2019

• Disambiguated researchers are now available for clinical trials. You can search for researchers using the researcher filter and analyse involved researchers with the ‘Researchers’ Analytical View.
• The compare chart has a new look and you can export the charts as jpeg, png and pdf. This chart type is available in Dimensions Plus and Dimensions Analytics for all content types and allows you to compare the activity per research category of two research organizations or funders.
• Chart settings are now stored until you leave the Analytical View. This allows you to add / remove filters or change the keywords without loosing your defined settings.

May 13, 2019

• Clinical trial references – Dimensions is extracting clinical trials references from publications. and shows the more than 1 million extracted links between clinical trials and publications on publication and clinical trials detail pages as ‘Clinical trial references’ and ‘publication citations’. References from clinical trials to publications are shown as ‘clinical trial citations’ and ‘publication references’.
• The citation indicator available in the ‘Overview’ panel has now three options to aggregate citations: total, mean, median.
• The bar chart visualization available in grants (research categories) has a new look and allows you to export the chart as jpeg, png, and pdf.

April 13, 2019

• ICRP Common Scientific Outline (CSO) and ICRP Cancer types have been added as new classification systems. CSO is a classification system organized into six broad areas of scientific interest in cancer research. ICRP cancer type coding scheme complements the CSO and is linked to the International Classification of Diseases. Both classification systems are available in Dimensions Analytics.
• You can now export tables with entities such as researchers, organizations, or source titles from Analytical Views as xlsx and csv. Available in Dimensions Analytics.
• Indicators in the Analytical view are now grouped by indicator type: Output, Academic impact, Altmetric attention.
• Funding amounts for grants can now be shown in New Zealand Dollars.

March 5, 2019

• With ‘Search in DOI’ you can now search for a single DOI or multiple DOIs combined with boolean ORs.
• There is now an ‘Open access’ Analytical View which includes visualizations to analyze OA activity over time and to create pivot tables – you can also select ‘Open access’ in all other heatmaps which allows you to quickly analyze the OA distribution per research category, organization, funder etc. Available in Dimensions Analytics.
• To reduce the clutter in the left-hand side filter panel we group filters as Research Categories, Location – Research Organization, and Patent categories.

February 14, 2019

• Dimensions Plus now supports the operator * which represents any group of characters, including no character.
• Details pages of edited books show the chapters published in this book.
• Book series title on details pages are now clickable which adds the book series to your query.

January 31, 2019

• Updated Source title facet / AV (includes book series)
• Registry country added to CT registry facet
• CiteSpace (linkout in the export confirmation popup, export center)
• Link from Chapter to Edited Book on details page

January 15, 2019

• Alerting – When creating a favorite you can opt-in to get email alerts for new items added to Dimensions. Alerts can be managed in the ‘browse favorites’ view.
• ‘Publishers’ Analytical View ‘ added including timeline and heatmap visualizations. Available in Dimensions Analytics.
• Export for bibliometric mapping now includes additional data which allows you to perform co-citation analyses with VOSviewer and term co-occurence analysis based on the publication title .
• Autocompletion in the research organization filter shows a tooltip with the full organization name, city and country.