baskaufs
commented
2 years ago Here's Olivia's email:
From: Kew-Fickus, Olivia olivia.m.kew-fickus@Vanderbilt.Edu Date: Tuesday, February 1, 2022 at 4:34 PM To: Kew-Fickus, Olivia olivia.m.kew-fickus@Vanderbilt.Edu Cc: Raver, Cybele cybele.raver@Vanderbilt.Edu, Tucker, Kosha kosha.tucker@Vanderbilt.Edu, George, Tracey tracey.george@Vanderbilt.Edu, Rodriguez, Stephanie stephanie.rodriguez@Vanderbilt.Edu, Craiglow, Hilary A hilary.craiglow@vanderbilt.edu Subject: Academic Analytics update Dear colleagues,
I am writing to you because you have at some point in the past five years received a login credential for Academic Analytics.
Vanderbilt has chosen to terminate our contract with Academic Analytics for access to their data portal. While we know that some colleagues were getting value from Academic Analytics’ data, the overall cost of the contract was large and the institutional impact simply wasn’t commensurate.
Your Academic Analytics logins will no longer work, and per the contract we are asked to delete all reports and other places where we have downloaded Academic Analytics’ proprietary information. Proprietary information includes items such as Scholarly Research Indices and assessments of “fit” for awards. We have been allowed to download factual information about our faculty from their databases, including items such as faculty awards granted and publications, and we are holding this in DSA’s local drives ready for use in other projects.
Last year we signed up for SciVal to provide an alternative source of analytics about scholarly activities. This analytical tool, which draws from the Scopus database of publications and several other ancillary databases, is not exactly like Academic Analytics, but it does provide some analogous services. For instance, it is possible in SciVal to search for information about individual researchers and to put this into context through tools such as Field-Weighted Citation Impact and H-indices. My team in Data and Strategic Analytics is also interested to work with colleagues seeking to do more complex bibliometric analyses. And unlike Academic Analytics, SciVal is open to all people with an active Vanderbilt account and therefore provides much greater transparency.
If you are interested in learning more about SciVal, please let my colleague Stephanie Rodriguez (stephanie.rodriguez@vanderbilt.edu) know and she can get you invited to a training session. We would also encourage you to jump on and play around, as the tool is relatively user-friendly (more so than Academic Analytics, in my view). Read the library’s helpful guide for accessing SciVal, as the login process is not SSO-driven. https://estacks.library.vanderbilt.edu/eresources_openaccess/SciVal_Sign_In.pdf
We have not completely cut ties with Academic Analytics. In fact, we have recently signed up to Academic Analytics’ PhD and post-doc outcomes service, which will give us data on the current locations of 10 years’ worth of PhD graduates and former post-docs. About half of the AAU universities are signed up to this service and they are getting data for 70-90% of their graduates. We will receive these data feeds annually and expect that over time we will build up a database of career trajectories for the Graduate School and schools and departments to use. We will also be able to compare this information to that from peer institutions who also receive the service.
We will continue to review our decision to cancel the Academic Analytics portal. Please do let us know if you think there is a case for reconsidering our current decision.
Best regards, Olivia Kew-Fickus
Olivia Kew-Fickus sent an email 2022-02-01 announcing that they have stopped subscribing to Academic Analytics in favor of SciVal. I have previous notes in projects/wikidata/publications/apis/scival-elsevier about using their API and in https://github.com/HeardLibrary/linked-data/tree/master/publications/elsevier . Plus there are also probably notes when we were doing that assessment of platforms, but I don't remember where. At some point this information should be consolidated in a findable location.