Assessing the impact and increase visibility of your Research Infrastructure (equipment and core facilities)
Daniel Boydell1, Alberto Zigoni1 1Elsevier
Abstract
Research Infrastructure (RI) – including core facilities and scientific equipment – is an essential input of research, together with people and money. It is critical for innovation and economic development. Institutions are investing heavily in infrastructure to support cutting edge research, foster impactful collaborations, and attract talent. The Australian government alone announced a $4 billion investment, supporting researchers with world leading RI.
To evaluate outcomes of such massive investment, research administrators must demonstrate the impact of RI in research and innovation, but this is an extremely onerous task. Unlike people and funding, there is no standard way to track the use of facilities and equipment in research projects.
Tracking is essential, however, not only for funder and internal reporting, but to build stronger future RI funding applications (by showing the investment’s impact). Additionally, it can help reproducibility of research, an essential goal of Open Science. The challenge therefore: “Is it possible to automatically link research outputs to equipment, in order to enable impact assessment?”
Over the past two years, Elsevier has worked on an innovation initiative that uses state-of-the art Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies to extract mentions of equipment from articles’ full text and link such mentions to a RI taxonomy.
The outputs of this analysis can produce impact assessments using tools such as Elsevier’s SciVal or integrating with Elsevier’s Pure to link your institution’s equipment to publications and project funding. This presentation will describe this initiative, it’s status and example projects from early adopting institutions around the world.
Biography
Alberto Zigoni joined Elsevier in 2011 as a consultant for the Research Intelligence portfolio, where he supported Academic and Government institutions in South Europe, Middle East and Africa, including several national research assessment exercises. He led the launch of Elsevier’s Research Data Management solutions and is currently responsible for the integration strategy of the Research Intelligence portfolio, where he is also leading the innovation projects related to research infrastructure tracking and evaluation. Alberto holds a Master’s degree in computer engineering from the University of Padua.