Gaining strategic insight and advantage from internally managed research information

The value and use of externally provided bibliometric platforms for strategic research decision making is well understood. What is less well understood is the additional value that strategic insights deriving from an institution’s own curated record of research can provide. Using research information curated for public profiling (VIVO) in Symplectic Elements by the Marine Biological Laboratory and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, we show how the application of topic modelling combined with internal collaboration analysis can be used to create a shared representation of the research identity and strength across an institution. From this analysis, targeted research questions can then be posed and answered. * What are the strategic research partnerships that should be pursued for specific research strengths? * Which researchers should be involved in the relationship? * What new areas of research should be invested in that would complement existing activity? * In a 'convening' research community such as Woods Hole, how can researchers quickly and accurately identify their potential, high-impact collaborators within a very diverse scientific ecosystem. Having identified research topics from internal research information, we show how these topics can then be used as ‘topic lenses’ in externally analytic platforms such as Dimensions to provide highly tailored environmental scans and analyses.