The research world has moved faster than many would have suspected possible in response to the current pandemic. In five months, a volume of work has been generated that even the most intensive of emergent fields have taken years to create.

The Digital Science Consultancy Team investigates the research landscape trends and cultural changes in response to COVID-19. The report includes an analysis of publication trends, geographic focal points of research, and collaboration patterns.

Our report, Contextualizing Sustainable Development Research, highlights the growth in research around the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). We believe the SDGs are now more relevant than ever, for they provide a framework for recovery from the current pandemic.

In the report we ask, if we are to have an impact agenda for research, should it not be one that is informed by the SDGs? And if so, should we not be actively measuring sustainable development as part of research evaluation?

This report is an analysis of the Open Access landscape since the turn of the millennium. It compares the leading countries for research outputs with those producing the most Open Access papers over a 16-year period, as well as Open Access collaboration trends. See the key findings from this report in our summary blog post.

Key findings from the report are:

• Countries that have invested in Open Access have typically increased their level of international collaboration.
• China has gone from not appearing in the top 12 producers of OA papers in 2010 to being the third highest in OA (2016).
• Brazil is another success story, second only to the UK, with 51.2% of its research output available through Open Access channels.

Gender imbalance in STEM and research, in general, is often discussed, and many initiatives have been put in place to attempt to redress the balance, however, without a quick and easy way to analyse the scale of imbalance within a field of research and institution, and without the means to easily compare progress with others, it is difficult to identify things that are working well to nudge a change in the demographic and to learn from and help others.

In order to make this analysis and comparison as easy as possible, we have created an interactive data visualiser that currently displays the gender splits for fields of research and UK institutions as determined by a gender guesser program that scanned all relevant Dimensions data between 2012 and 2017, with a commitment to extending this to include other countries and updating this with new data so that changes can be monitored over time.

Using Dimensions data and analysis from the interactive data visualisation tool, we confirmed the gender imbalance in UK STEM research is indeed much greater than that in the Arts and Humanities, and despite some Arts and Humanities fields of research in some institutions having more women than men, a snapshot of gender splits across the whole of the UK showed that women are yet to reach gender parity in these subjects. As our interactive visualiser is updated, we hope that the richness of data and the ease of use will make it a useful tool for those monitoring gender balance in all fields of research.

Japan finds itself in a difficult position regarding ongoing funding for research in turbulent financial times but is starting to be much more active on the world stage. The indicators show a positive future for Japan if the leadership of top researchers can cascade down to the broader research population and make Japan much more outward bound in its research collaboration landscape. If this is supported by funders with innovative approaches to funding and incentivising Japan’s increased engagement and visibility on the world research stage then Japan looks forward to a prosperous and important place in the global knowledge economy.

This report was intended to reproduce a study published recently in BMJ Open, but using author disambiguation, data, categories, and links from Dimensions. We used the 7,615 grants about cancer received by researchers at UK institutions between 2007 and 2017. Women represented only about 30% of the funded researchers in the UK, and even though grant numbers have fluctuated a lot in these 11 years, the proportion of women receiving grants remained constant. However, the share of grant amount has increased slightly, from 25% to 30% of the total. Using pre-existing categories in Dimensions, we discovered that women received grants in widespread diseases (e.g. obesity, smoking), while men received grants in cancers with very low survival rates (pancreatic and brain cancer).

Using Dimensions, we confirmed the gender imbalance for grant receivers in one field of research; cancer research in the UK.

In this report, we take a new look at international collaboration patterns focussing on the Australasian region. More than other regions in the world, Australasia has always been outward looking and its research community has sought to connect itself with international partners. This is, no doubt, in part due to the geographical location of the continent but other factors play a role including the heavy development of Australasia’s research base in the last few years and the importance and power of that research base as an economic driver for the region.

More recently, a coherent focus has been taken across the region to international engagement. We have used Digital cience’s Dimensions database together with a filter of high-quality journals provided by the Nature Index journal list to explore the national and international collaboration landscape in Australia and New Zealand.

Our report finds new evidence that highlights differences in the primary audiences engaging with malaria and Alzheimer’s disease research, respectively.

The study, which was conducted by the consultancy team at Digital Science, concluded that policymakers make up the primary community engaging with Malaria research, whilst practitioners and mainstream news outlets were most prominent for Alzheimer’s disease.

This report offers an overview of some novel methods of analysing research funding data. The UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) has worked with Digital Science Consultancy on an exploratory project using innovative techniques to offer new perspectives of the AHRC’s competitively funded research. It has unlocked rich information within the funding data, not through the existing discipline taxonomies but through analysis of the content of application summaries.

This has uncovered changes across time and location, and at varying levels of detail. It’s the first time topic modelling has been applied on a national funding dataset of leading, peer-reviewed research grants activity within the arts and humanities.