Learn how a new module within InCites Benchmarking & Analytics™ can help you see the leading edge of research.
In a fundamentally uncertain world, scientific and academic research serves to make unknowns known, one small step at a time. Yet due to the ever-expanding volume of research published worldwide and the complexity of organizational and researcher networks, it can be challenging to identify early breakthroughs and understand the extent to which your organization is participating in the leading edge of research.
Today, we are proud to release Research Horizon Navigator™, a new AI-native module within InCites Benchmarking & Analytics™ designed to empower academics, funding agencies, government research organizations and research strategists to discover new topics emerging from published literature that point to where future breakthroughs are likely to occur.
Informed by decades of research
For decades, Web of Science Core Collection™ data have served to map the research landscape, revealing shifting patterns of collaboration, changes in the share of world research produced by countries, and which authors make the most significant contributions. Building upon Henry Small’s groundbreaking work on co-citation analysis and more recent research from the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI)™, Research Horizon Navigator employs a novel methodology to identify new topics emerging in articles, reviews and conference proceedings published in the past five years.
Within the new module, users can search, browse and visualize over nine thousand topics emerging from within and across 254 Web of Science Core Collection subject categories to gain a dynamic perspective on how new research areas form, grow, branch and merge.
Visualization of the papers in one emerging topic within Research Horizon Navigator
An emerging topic is a group of recently published papers related through co-citation that represents a new area of inquiry. Because our methodology clusters papers together based on both similarity and recency, our topics provide a fresher perspective on what’s new than what can be achieved through direct citation or keyword-based analysis. Within Horizon Navigator, each topic is labeled with a research theme assigned by generative AI, offers an interactive visualization that shows how papers are connected, and includes an overview where users can explore which authors and institutions have contributed.
New interdisciplinarity indicator
Horizon Navigator also measures the interdisciplinarity of each emerging topic. The research community has long considered interdisciplinary research to be a key driver of novel and disruptive research. For example, the United States National Science Foundation’s 10 Big Ideas, which first launched in 2016, highlight the importance of convergence research in solving society’s grand challenges. However, defining what constitutes interdisciplinarity and how it manifests in publications can be challenging even for data scientists, leaving research managers with limited information to gauge the success of initiatives designed to stimulate it. Horizon Navigator enables all users to easily understand whether each topic draws from many fields or just one, and to what degree.
Empowering the research community
Research Horizon Navigator is available now to all InCites Benchmarking & Analytics subscribers, providing an invaluable resource to inform horizon-scanning projects and strategic planning initiatives. Key applications for the tool include:
- Technology watch: Easily monitor “known unknowns” in the research landscape in targeted areas of interest to your organization.
- Collaboration: Quickly discover which researchers and institutions are participating in the leading edge of research to inform your strategy.
- Funding program management: Identify topics that are shaping the future of science and innovation to inform your future investments.
- Research assessment: Understand where your institution is contributing to novel advances in research.
By empowering institutions to understand where research is heading and who is leading the way, our goal is to accelerate breakthroughs across disciplines and countries.
Shaping the future of research
We look forward to hearing reactions and feedback from the community as we plan further enhancements to Research Horizon Navigator. In addition to improving the tool within InCites, we are also incorporating emerging topics into Web of Science Research Intelligence so that institutions can identify relevant funding opportunities within emerging research areas and gain insight into where they are strategically positioned to succeed.
Register for our webinar to learn more about Research Horizon Navigator.
