Unicamp has just signed three important databases, which should promote a leap in the university's scientific production search capacity. The Unicamp Library System (SBU) began subscribing to the Dimensions Analytics, Overton and Orbis databases. In addition, it acquired e-books from the world's leading scientific publishers, such as Springer, Wiley, Elsevier, Taylor and Francis, Sage, Cambridge and Oxford, in an action that should significantly expand the capacity to offer quality content to the community from Unicamp.
The Dimensions database should optimize and expand the search capacity for different types of research content from around the world, such as scientific articles, datasets, clinical trials, public policy documents, etc., in addition to allowing for in-depth analysis of Dimensions data. university with its peers, as well as monitoring Unicamp's research performance in all areas of knowledge.
According to the deputy director of the SBU, Márcio Souza Martins, the tool allows specific data approaches, in which it is possible to measure, for example, the impact of a research, a researcher or group of researchers, identify international collaborations, among others interactions.
It also allows you to obtain altmetric indicators, which are complementary to traditional bibliometric indicators and which have become increasingly important. Altmetric indicators measure the visibility and impact of a search on the Internet, such as on social networks, bibliographic reference managers, blogs or media outlets.
According to him, there are currently three main scientific production databases that offer bibliometric indicators: the Web of Science, Scopus and Dimensions. The big difference with the latter is that it retrieves scientific and technological publications that have the so-called DOI (Digital Object Identifier) – a persistent identification standard for objects (documents) in digital networks. Because of this, it has much greater coverage than the other two and allows for greater document recovery.
“We will have a new tool, which will offer other types of indicators and enable a more holistic analysis of Unicamp’s scientific production”, he explains. “We will be able to compare our production with other institutions in Brazil and other countries and identify in which area we are doing well, what we need to improve or prospect for new international collaborations”, he adds. “There are many advantages”, he defines.
The director of the SBU, Oscar Eliel, states that Unicamp is increasingly using these databases to evaluate the University's scientific production. “We will be able to recover the university’s scientific production and extract metadata, even so that we can feed our Institutional Repository. Furthermore, we will know the state of the art in a given area of knowledge; which themes are most worked on, which are the frontier themes, in short, measuring the impact of the university’s production”, he says.
In addition to Dimensions, Unicamp also signed the Overton database, which specializes in storing information on public policies and which provides the largest collection of political documents in the world, such as parliamentary transcripts, Central Bank working documents and reports from Organizations. Non-Governmental.
Orbis – the third subscription – covers data on the business sector, providing strategic information on the structure of corporations and the business universe, widely used in research by the Institute of Economics, for example.
Evidence-based procurement
The SBU also decided to expand the e-book collection, which today reaches more than 500 thousand titles. Márcio de Souza Martins explains that the expansion of the collection was carried out with the main scientific publishers in the world, and the acquisition was based on the business model that is technically called “Evidence-Based Acquisition” – in which the University pays a annual subscription, and the amount invested is, at the end of one year, converted into a perpetual acquisition.
Martins says there are many advantages to the model. “After the initial payment, the publisher makes available a very large collection of e-books and, at the end of a year, based on statistical data and demands from teachers and researchers themselves, we select the titles, according to the amount that was invested 12 months previously”, he says.
When making a decision on the definitive purchase, the SBU takes into account three fundamental criteria: the titles indicated in the basic bibliographies of postgraduate courses; the appointment of teaching staff, researchers and librarians; and usage statistics. The director of the SBU, Oscar Eliel, says that the demand for digital publications grew during the pandemic, hence the need to expand the collection.
How to access
Access to the Dimensions and Overton bases is through the University's IPs or via VPN. Access to Orbis is via login and password for 20 users of the Institute of Economics.
The links to the bases are:
