Digital Science, a major provider of products and services for research and scholarly communications, has launched Dimensions as a new citation database product that includes discovery, analytics, and links to scientific articles. Dimensions will be a potentially disruptive product, offering free access to a very large citation database in a field of subscriptionbased competitors. Digital Science also offers subscriptions to Dimensions with additional features.
Dimensions goes beyond traditional citation indexing by providing information regarding the funding and research context for each article, including funding agencies, grants, patents, and clinical trials. The current product is a relaunch of Dimensions. The earlier version centered only on the research context and did not include a citation database. The free version of Dimensions provides a search engine for the citation database of 89 million publications. Paid subscriptions enable access to a premium version that includes the citation metrics and the research context features. The premium version also enables access to an API for programmatic access to queries and search results.
Dimensions represents a major new competitor in a product genre of scientific discovery tools that also includes Elsevier's Scopus and Web of Science from Clarivate. View Table 1 in the Appendix on page 7 to see a comparison of these three discovery tools. These discovery tools focus on the body of scientific literature and differ from broad-based discovery services, such as EBSCO Discovery Service, Primo, Summon, and WorldCat Discovery Service, which index content across all academic disciplines.
Digital Science is a portfolio company of the Holtzbrinck Publishing Group founded in 2010 as a spin-off from Macmillan Publishers and Nature Publishing Group. Holzbrink is the majority investor in Springer Nature. Some of the portfolio companies of Digital Science include:
- Altmetric
- Digital Science Consultancy
- Figshare
- Readcube
- Symplectic
- ÜberResearch
For more information on Dimensions, see:
- Roger C. Schonfeld, “A New Citation Database Launches Today: Digital Science's Dimensions,” Scholarly Kitchen, January 15, 2018, https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2018 /01/15/new-citation-database-dimensions/.
- Richard Van Noorden, “Science Search Engine Links Papers to Grants and Patents,” Nature, January 16, 2018, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-00688-0.
| Table 1: Comparison of Research Search and Workflow Tools | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Elsevier | Digital Science | Clarivate | |
| Citation Database | Scopus | Dimensions | Web of Science |
| Content Indexed | 69 million publications from 5,000 publishers; 22,800 journals; 150,000 books | 89 million publications; 870 million citations | 68 million publications; 33,000 journals; 88,000 books |
| Analytics | SciVal Plum Analytics PlumX | Altmetric | InSites Essential Science Indicators |
| Reference Manager | Mendeley | EndNote | |
| Research Information Management System | Pure | Symplectic | |
| Management System for Journals | ScholarOne | ||
| Peer Review Tracking and Recognition | Publons | ||
| Research Data Repository | FigShare | ||
| Institutional Article Repository | Bepress | ||
| Scientific Collaborative Network | SSRN | ||
| Media Monitoring of Articles and Research | Newsflo | ||
| Collaborative Writing and Publishing Tool | Hivebench electronic lab notebook | Overleaf | |
| Decision Support for Science Funding | ÜberResearch | ||
| Ownership | RELX (previously Reed Elsevier. Publicly traded on London Stock Exchange and Amsterdam Stock Exchange) | Holtzbrinck Publishing Group | Baring Private Equity Asia (previously part of Thompson Reuters) |