Research Information Glossary
Plain-English definitions of the terms research leaders, research offices, and IT teams meet when evaluating research intelligence — from RIMS and bibliometrics to REF and SDG mapping.
- ARWU
- The Academic Ranking of World Universities, a global ranking weighted heavily towards research output and highly cited researchers.
- Altmetrics
- Alternative impact indicators that capture attention to research beyond citations — policy documents, news, and online mentions — used alongside bibliometrics to evidence societal reach.
- Bibliometrics
- The quantitative analysis of publications and citations used to measure research productivity and impact at researcher, unit, or institutional level.
- CERIF
- The Common European Research Information Format, a standard data model for exchanging research information between systems.
- CRIS
- A Current Research Information System — functionally equivalent to a RIMS, emphasising the structured information model behind research data.
- Carnegie Classification
- A framework categorising United States higher-education institutions, whose research designations influence reputation, funding eligibility, and benchmarking.
- Citation impact
- A measure of how often an institution's outputs are cited, typically field-normalised so disciplines with different citation cultures can be compared fairly.
- CiteScore
- A journal-level citation metric derived from Scopus that averages citations per document over a multi-year window, offered as an alternative to the Journal Impact Factor.
- CoARA
- The Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment, an 800+ organisation commitment (launched 2022; National Chapters active across Europe and Asia-Pacific) to reform research evaluation away from narrow journal-based metrics towards broader, context-aware assessment.
- Crossref
- A scholarly infrastructure organisation providing DOI registration and authoritative publication metadata, one of the global sources a RIMS ingests.
- DBLP
- A bibliographic database focused on computer science publications and author profiles, widely used as a complementary source for CS and engineering researcher records.
- DOI
- A Digital Object Identifier, the persistent identifier for a scholarly output that enables reliable linking and metadata resolution.
- DORA
- The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, an international commitment to evaluate research on its own merits rather than the journal it appears in.
- Dimensions
- A linked research-information database covering publications, grants, patents, and policy documents, used in some institutions as a complementary discovery and analytics source.
- Ego network
- A researcher-centred co-authorship network showing direct collaborators and the connections between them, used to discover clusters and partnership opportunities.
- FAIR data
- Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable — the de-facto principles for research data management that a modern RIMS supports via persistent identifiers, structured metadata, and clear licensing.
- FWCI
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact — citations normalised against the world average for the same field, year, and document type, enabling fair cross-discipline comparison.
- Horizon Europe
- The European Union research and innovation framework programme, which combines significant funding with substantial output and dissemination reporting obligations.
- Institutional repository
- A system that stores and preserves full-text research outputs for access and compliance — complementary to, not a replacement for, a RIMS.
- Internationalisation metrics
- Indicators quantifying international research collaboration, such as international co-authorship share and partner-country distribution.
- JCR
- Journal Citation Reports, an annual publication that assigns each indexed journal a Journal Impact Factor and related citation metrics.
- JIF
- The Journal Impact Factor — the average citations per article a journal received over the previous two years; widely cited and widely misused as a researcher-level proxy.
- LLM
- Large Language Model — a generative AI system trained on broad text corpora; increasingly used in research workflows for summarisation and disambiguation, but unreliable as a primary research-evaluation tool without human oversight.
- OAI-PMH
- The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, an interoperability standard that lets a RIMS ingest publication metadata from institutional repositories and other compliant sources.
- ORCID
- A persistent digital identifier for researchers that resolves name ambiguity and links a researcher reliably to their outputs across systems.
- OpenAlex
- An open, comprehensive index of global scholarly works and authors, providing broad open-science coverage as one of the sources a RIMS unifies.
- Plan S
- A European-led initiative requiring research funded by participating organisations to be published in compliant open-access venues, shaping institutional publication policy.
- Preprint
- A complete scholarly manuscript posted to a public server before formal peer review and journal publication, increasingly captured as a first-class output in research records.
- RIMS
- A Research Information Management System — the institutional system of record for publications, researchers, citations, collaborations, and impact.
- ROR
- The Research Organization Registry — a community-led persistent identifier for research organisations (110,000+ entries), used to disambiguate institutional affiliations across publications, grants, and researcher records.
- SDG mapping
- The classification of research outputs against the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals to evidence societal impact and relevance.
- SJR
- SCImago Journal Rank — a journal prestige metric weighted by the prestige of the citing journals rather than treating every citation equally.
- SNIP
- Source Normalized Impact per Paper — a journal citation metric that adjusts for differences in citation behaviour between fields, enabling fairer cross-discipline comparison.
- Scimago
- A source of journal rankings and quartile classifications used to add journal-quality context to an institution's output.
- Scopus
- A curated abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature, one of the authoritative global sources a RIMS reconciles.
- Semantic Scholar
- An open scholarly index that adds machine-learning-derived signals — such as influential citations and topic linkages — to publication metadata.
- Single source of truth
- One authoritative, continuously reconciled dataset that every team and report draws on, eliminating conflicting figures for the same metric.
- h-index
- A metric balancing productivity and impact: the largest number h such that h outputs each have at least h citations.
See these concepts working in production
Discover RIMS unifies Scopus, OpenAlex, ORCID, Crossref and Scimago into one reconciled platform — in production at Universitas Hasanuddin.