Thomson Reuters, the authority on research analytics and decision support citation data for more than half a century, announced today that it has begun working with thousands of institutions and research facilities to produce a one-of-a-kind resource. This initiative, the Global Institutional Profiles Project, will create data-driven portraits of globally significant research institutions - combining peer review, scholarly outputs, citation patterns, funding levels, and faculty characteristics in one comprehensive database.
"There is a need for robust, dynamic, and above all transparent and verifiable data on scholarly performance to reshape how administrators approach institutional comparisons," said Keith MacGregor, executive vice president at Thomson Reuters. "Thomson Reuters has the proven history of bibliometric expertise and analysis to provide the foundational data and consultative elements needed to create this tool."
The dataset can be packaged and analyzed to different specifications, allowing organizations to receive custom information for their specific needs. The Times Higher Education, a London-based weekly newspaper that covers higher education issues, is the first to request a customized dataset to produce an improved version of their annual World University Rankings. The publication will work closely with Thomson Reuters to create a balanced, transparent methodology to support their influential rankings.
The Global Institutional Profiles Project has already begun with a worldwide survey of opinion leaders at key research institutions. The advice they provide will inform the project both in terms of data collected and methodologies used. Thomson Reuters goal is to be fully transparent in approach and verifiable in outcomes, so the results of the opinion survey will be published in Q1 of 2010.
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