The context

Each organisation needs a clear view of the work its people produce, the expertise behind it and the opportunities it creates. Building that view often means repeating searches, reconciling affiliations, updating spreadsheets and assembling reports by hand.

The information is scattered across publication databases, trial registries, faculty biographies and departmental records. Collecting and organising it consumes time and resources that research teams could spend on grant applications, scientific collaboration and the research itself.

ScienceLeadR connects trusted sources such as PubMed, OpenAlex and ClinicalTrials.gov. It uses AI to aggregate scientific records and organise them around researchers, departments and institutions, creating a shared evidence base for ongoing monitoring and reporting.

What is institutional expertise mapping?

Institutional expertise mapping connects researchers, research groups and labs with their scientific subjects, methods, contributions and professional relationships. Alongside monitoring, it helps an organisation answer practical questions:

• Who works on this disease, technique or research question?
• Which departments, research groups and labs have complementary expertise?
• Which people and sites contribute to each research area?
• Where do we have established expertise, and where are young researchers and rising stars emerging?
• What evidence can we use in grant applications, partnership discussions and institutional communications?

Together, these connections form an institution’s scientific footprint: its people, the work they produce and the reach of their collaborations. The aim is to measure and monitor that footprint, then use the findings to support decisions.

This approach is visible in academic practice. UCSF’s research networking approach connects researchers with scientific topics and co-authorship networks, with supporting publications explaining certain connections. It illustrates the value of making the evidence behind a relationship easy to explore.

ScienceLeadR’s academic offering supports monitoring at institution, department and individual researcher levels, alongside scientific footprint analysis, collaboration mapping and talent discovery.

Connect scientific activity to the right people and teams

A useful map starts with a clear organisational scope. For a medical school, that might include departments, research centres and affiliated teaching hospitals. For an institute, it could mean research groups, labs and shared programmes. A multi-site organisation also needs to distinguish the contributions of its different locations.

Agree which people, units and sites belong in the analysis, and for which period. Joint appointments and changing affiliations can affect how work is represented. Crossref’s explanation of institutional identifiers shows how variations in an organisation’s name can make its publications harder to find. Reconciling those variations helps build a more accurate picture of activity.

ScienceLeadR brings together records from publications, clinical trials, grants, patents and congress activity, using identity resolution to connect scientific contributions with researchers and organisations. Its expertise mapping organises those records into scientific topics and relationships.

The research office can then ask: “Who across our medical school has experience in inflammation and cardiovascular disease?” Or, for a multi-site institution: “Which sites and people contribute to this programme, and where are their complementary strengths?”

Departmental knowledge remains valuable. Reviewing current appointments and ambiguous records helps ensure the map reflects the organisation accurately.

Automate data collection and scientific reporting

Research offices and department heads often need the same information for different purposes: a leadership update, a funding application, a partnership discussion or an annual report. Rebuilding that information for each request creates a recurring administrative burden.

ScienceLeadR uses AI to automate the collection and organisation of scientific information and support publication intelligence at institution, department and author levels. Connected source records provide the basis for real-time monitoring of scientific production as new information becomes available.

The practical benefit is a repeatable workflow: gather the evidence, connect it to the right people and units, monitor the activity and turn the findings into reports the organisation can use.

• Monitor departments and authors. Follow publications, authorship and research themes within a defined organisational scope.
• See contributions across sites. Understand which locations, teams and people contribute to a scientific area.
• Support recurring reporting. Bring relevant evidence together for review without repeating the same manual searches for every request.

By reducing the burden of data collection and organisation, AI can free teams to focus on applying for grants, identifying research opportunities, building the right networks and acting on the insights in their scientific data.

Build a 360° view of your scientific strengths

Different activities reveal different aspects of expertise. A publication shows a contribution to a research topic. A clinical trial documents participation in clinical investigation. A congress presentation adds evidence of scientific participation and visibility.

ScienceLeadR brings these dimensions together so leadership can measure, assess and monitor scientific production, including the topics being studied and the people contributing to them.

See established expertise and the next generation

An expertise map should help an institution understand its people as well as its output. Which researchers contribute the most publications? Whose work is highly cited? Which researchers publish in journals with higher impact factors? How do those patterns vary by field, team and career stage?

It should also help answer a forward-looking question: does the institution rely mainly on its most established researchers, or is it building a reservoir of young researchers and rising stars? Looking across career stages helps leadership recognise emerging expertise and consider future collaboration, development and visibility opportunities.

Understanding a person’s contribution also matters. NISO’s CRediT taxonomy provides 14 roles for describing research contributions. Where contribution statements are available, they can help teams interpret the expertise behind an author’s name.

For a department head, this view can reveal a developing research theme. For a dean, it can show strengths shared by several departments or sites. For a communications team, it identifies specific people and work to feature.

Use the map to bring the right expertise together

The National Cancer Institute’s guidance on team science describes how researchers with different skills and disciplinary backgrounds can work together on complex scientific problems. Understanding where those complementary capabilities sit helps an institution assemble a relevant team.

Consider a medical school developing a cardiometabolic research programme. It may need clinical investigators, laboratory scientists, imaging specialists and researchers with relevant statistical expertise. A topic-based view helps the research office identify potential contributors across departmental and site boundaries, then review the evidence behind their relevance.

ScienceLeadR’s collaboration analysis adds another perspective by showing co-authorship and research connections. Teams can explore existing relationships, see their national and international reach, identify colleagues who connect different groups and investigate potential external collaborators.

An institute preparing a consortium proposal can use this evidence to describe its contribution more precisely and identify expertise it still needs to bring into the partnership. Researchers then confirm their current interests, availability and potential contribution.

Make your expertise visible on your institutional page

Once your organisation can explain its scientific strengths, the next step is to make those strengths discoverable. Prospective collaborators, funders and researchers need a clear route to the people, work and opportunities relevant to them.

ScienceLeadR provides an institutional page where your organisation’s scientific expertise can be presented through a verified third party. Contact the team to create or claim your institutional page and bring together the evidence behind your institution’s strengths.

• Show the people behind the expertise. Highlight relevant researchers, departments, research groups and labs, including rising stars alongside established leaders.
• Explain your scientific strengths. Connect the institution’s research themes with documented scientific activity and collaboration networks.
• Highlight scientific opportunities. Use your institutional page to give research and collaboration opportunities a clearer presence.

Enrich your corporate communications with platform insights

The same scientific intelligence can support partnership briefs, corporate communication documents, annual reports, departmental updates and newsletters. Communications teams can use insights from ScienceLeadR to explain an institutional strength, feature a researcher’s contribution or give a potential partner a concrete starting point.

For example, a hospital preparing a research capability brief can use evidence of investigator experience, publications, clinical trial participation and existing collaborations to explain what its teams could contribute. The people behind those achievements, including emerging researchers, become easier to identify and feature.

ScienceLeadR’s reporting and scientific monitoring capabilities support this work. Its platform overview also describes evidence-based reports and AI-assisted content generation. Communications teams can review and adapt these outputs for their own documents and channels.

Keep the picture current, explainable and useful

An expertise map needs to evolve as researchers move, new studies appear and teams develop new interests. Ongoing monitoring makes it possible to revisit the evidence as the institution changes.

ScienceLeadR supports ongoing monitoring and researcher profile claiming through ORCID. Researchers can review and enrich their records, connecting aggregated scientific information with their own knowledge of their work.

Make the scope of an analysis clear: the people, departments and sites included, the period covered and the evidence used. Comparisons become more meaningful when they account for differences in discipline, career stage and types of contribution.

This approach is consistent with DORA’s recommendations to assess research on its merits and consider a broader range of outputs and contributions. Review publication counts, citations and journal-level indicators alongside the work itself and the contribution each person makes.

Scientific activity provides evidence for judgement; publication totals alone cannot describe everything a researcher or department contributes.

Review what the workflow helps your organisation do: reduce repeated data collection, prepare a useful leadership report, identify a collaborator, recognise rising stars or make institutional expertise easier to discover.

Frequently asked questions