Northwestern University Joins VIVO Network with Elsevier's SciVal Experts

NEW YORK, August 9, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --

Expertise Profiling Application Enables Researchers to Find Collaborators Throughout Northwestern University and Across VIVO

Northwestern University, in collaboration with Elsevier, a world-leading provider of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, today announced its participation in VIVO, a semantic network that enables the discovery of researchers across institutions. By bringing its researchers together in a single hub called Northwestern Scholars, an implementation of Elsevier's SciVal Experts research networking tool, and connecting to VIVO through SciVal, Northwestern University facilitates collaboration and accelerates knowledge discovery within the organization and with other research institutions throughout the United States and beyond.

Northwestern Scholars provides the Northwestern University research community, other research organizations and the public with a networking website and searchable database to discover Northwestern faculty members' individual research expertise. The hub is populated with publication data from Elsevier's Scopus^® database and Northwestern University's own grants and faculty appointment data as well as investigators' curriculum vitae data. The application contains profiles for nearly 3,000 researchers across Northwestern's 12 schools, housing over 115,000 publications.

By connecting to the VIVO semantic network, Northwestern University can now share its data with other web-based applications that support research collaboration. VIVO uses a common data standard that allows research expertise software applications to work together seamlessly, and provides a framework for open discovery of research networks. VIVO-compliant software tools can now use Northwestern University's profile data to help scholars across the globe discover Northwestern faculty members' expertise, and in turn investigators at Northwestern can use the tools to find experts at other institutions.

"By adopting SciVal and participating in the VIVO network, we are making it easier for investigators throughout Northwestern University to form research teams, find reviewers for grant applications and become more competitive in securing funding," said Ruth Reingold, Senior Business Systems Analyst, Northwestern University, who has led the implementation of the system. "We are sharing a wide range of expertise data across VIVO so that other institutions can discover the research and scholarship at Northwestern."

Niels Weertman, Vice President, SciVal, at Elsevier, said, "As the competitiveness of the funding landscape continues to increase, research institutions must look for smart tools and initiatives like SciVal Experts and VIVO that support the partnerships that can secure collaborative extramural research funding, Elsevier is an avid supporter of VIVO and is pleased to partner with Northwestern University to enable its research community to become more accessible to scholars and the public."

SciVal Experts uses the Elsevier Fingerprint Engine™, an advanced semantic technology, to identify investigators' specific areas of expertise. This makes it easier to find collaborators and build an intellectual inventory of the university. Now available to all institutions, SciVal Experts' VIVO integration can save organizations the substantial time and resources required to launch and maintain their own research networking system.

About Northwestern University

Founded in 1851, Northwestern University is one of the country's leading private research and teaching universities with an enrollment of approximately 8,000 full-time undergraduate students and approximately 8,000 full-time graduate and professional students and approximately 2,000 part-time students on campuses in Evanston and Chicago, Illinois, and Doha, Qatar. Northwestern combines innovative teaching and pioneering research in a highly collaborative environment that transcends traditional academic boundaries. Northwestern provides students and faculty exceptional opportunities for intellectual, personal and professional growth in a setting enhanced by the richness of Chicago.

About Elsevier's SciVal Suite
Elsevier's SciVal® suite of services supports academic and government leadership in evaluating, establishing and executing research strategies that optimize the performance of existing assets and maximize investments to enhance near and long-term productivity. SciVal tools leverage Scopus® data, Elsevier's trusted source of bibliometric data, to offer innovative yet authoritative solutions. Current suite offerings include: SciVal Spotlight, a strategic tool that generates unique institutional and country maps of existing and emerging research strengths based on an interdisciplinary perspective of current performance; SciVal Funding, an online solution that provides targeted recommendations on grants to pursue based on pre-populated research profiles and historical awards; SciVal Strata, a web-based research performance tool that offers users the flexibility to construct relevant contextual data to evaluate research teams or individual researchers, using a range of indicators based on Scopus data; SciVal Experts, a semantic technology-based application that enables researchers to identify and locate sources of expertise at an individual or departmental level within and across institutions.

About VIVO

VIVO is an open source semantic web application for integrating and sharing information about researchers and their activities and outputs at a single institution while supporting discovery of related work and expertise across a distributed network. VIVO is fundamentally interdisciplinary; it enables and promotes the discovery of research and scholarship across traditional boundaries of geography, organization structure and type, academic or clinical or applied domain, technology, language, and culture.

There is a diverse collection of activities associated with the VIVO project, across federal agencies, academic institutions, professional societies, and data providers, as well as a variety of efforts with the Semantic Web and ontology development communities. Significant partners include CASRAI (Consortium Advancing Standards in Research Administration Information), euroCRIS (Current Research Information Systems) and the ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) Initiative.

Producers of VIVO-compliant data include: the USDA (United States Department of Agriculture), Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) Consortium institutions, the American Psychological Association and the Publish Trust Project, Symplectic Limited, the Australian-based ANDS VIVO project, and a growing number of institutional VIVO implementers around the world. For more information about VIVO, please visit: http://vivoweb.org.

About Elsevier
Elsevier is a world-leading provider of scientific, technical and medical information products and services. The company works in partnership with the global science and health communities to publish more than 2,000 journals, including The Lancet and Cell, and close to 20,000 book titles, including major reference works from Mosby and Saunders. Elsevier's online solutions include ScienceDirect, Scopus, Reaxys, ClinicalKey and Mosby's Nursing Suite, which enhance the productivity of science and health professionals, and the SciVal suite and MEDai's Pinpoint Review, which help research and health care institutions deliver better outcomes more cost-effectively.

A global business headquartered in Amsterdam, Elsevier employs 7,000 people worldwide. The company is part of Reed Elsevier Group PLC, a world-leading publisher and information provider, which is jointly owned by Reed Elsevier PLC and Reed Elsevier NV. The ticker symbols are REN (Euronext Amsterdam), REL (London Stock Exchange), RUK and ENL (New York Stock Exchange).

Media contact
Catherine Gold
Elsevier
+1-212-462-1965
c.gold@elsevier.com