Driving change via next-generation research analysis

The Faculty of Science, University of Technology Sydney has embarked on a new strategy to grow its research workforce in order to support the University’s objective to double its research funding by 2021. In order to grow both rapidly and sustainably, emphasis has been placed on identifying paths of expansion that reinforce the existing natural clusters of research activity.

To draw out these natural research clusters, the Faculty of Science worked with Digital Science Consultancy to employ next-generation research analysis techniques combining both network and topic analysis. The data for the analysis were all made available through the UTS research management information system.

This presentation will highlight the advantages of making strategic decisions based on network analysis, and the various perspectives through which this can be understood including faculty, departmental, fields of research, and HR attributes such as gender, employment type and position.

The advantages of employing topic analysis to identify natural research strengths will also be explored. Digital Science conducted a topic analysis using the titles and abstracts of UTS Faculty of Science publications. The identified topics were then superimposed on the network of people to provide a map of both collaboration and research activity. Select topics of management interest could then be used as ‘topic lenses’ in third-party analytic platforms such as Dimensions to provide highly-tailored environmental scans and analyses. This retrieves data suitable for seeding discussions on recruitment strategy and institution level collaborations.