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Data Sources and Tools

Grant and funding information sources

NIH RePORTER: (Freely available) Grant information, associated publications, and associated patents (if available) for grants funded by NIH.

 

Publication data sources

PubMed: (Freely available) Extensive database of publications about or related to biomedicine. Especially useful for biomedical topic searching and for identifying publications funded by NIH Institutes and Centers.

Web of Science: Publication database covering all areas of science. Includes author affiliations, funding information, cited references, and times cited counts for indexed publications.

InCites: Analytical database built on Web of Science data that automatically calculates a range of advanced bibliometric indicators for most publications in the Web of Science Core Collection. NIH staff can register for an account (while onsite or on VPN) to use InCites.

Scopus: Publication database covering all areas of science. Includes author affiliations, cited references, and times cited counts for indexed publications.

Dimensions.ai: (Freely available version) Citation index database that allows user to view Altmetric score for articles (find out how many times and who has cited the article in social media, news, blogs, patents, etc.).

 

Data cleaning and analysis tools

OpenRefine: (Freely available) Data cleaning and rearranging tool. Especially useful for standardizing variant forms of author and institution names prior to creating and analyzing collaboration networks.

Science of Science (Sci2) Tool: (Freely available) General purpose analysis tool for various publication analysis tasks, especially creating, analyzing, and pruning networks. Specifically designed for working with publication data, but can be extended to work with generic data as well.

R and RStudio: (Freely available) General purpose data analysis and visualization software and programming language. Useful for gathering data via APIs, analyzing data, text mining, and other tasks. Useful packages include: httr, XML, plyr, tm, topicmodels, igraph, and ggplot2.

 

Data visualization tools

Inkscape: (Freely available) Visualization editing and polishing tool. Cannot create visualizations from raw data, but is useful for editing and/or combining visualizations created in other tools.

VOSviewer: (Freely available) A free software tool for constructing and visualizing bibliometric networks.