Designing a business intelligence-based monitoring platform for evaluating research collaborations within university networks: the case of UNICA - the Network of Universities from the Capitals of Europe.

Abstract

The scope of the study is to provide decision support for academic networks to reveal the efficiency of the collaborations among the researchers. This research proposes a monitoring environment to evaluate collaboration patterns in all research areas and foster innovative, interdisciplinary, and international research. The paper presents a novel application framework for the Network of the Universities from the Capitals of Europe (UNICA) based on business intelligence. The framework is applied by analysing co-authorships through data from the Web of Science (2015 and 2020). Co-authorships between member universities are queried from the large-scale bibliographic data. A new bibliometric data warehouse is created with the integrated use of database operations with text analytics. Dashboards associated with the data warehouse contain many performance indicators and statistics based on interactive filters. The findings cover many features of the monitoring environment and statistics in various research domains (Life Science and Biomedicine, Physical Sciences, Technology, Social Sciences, Arts, and Humanities). User-friendly geographical maps visualized the most significant collaborations in various domains. The study provides an intellectual contribution by revealing the differences in collaboration levels of the research areas and indicating the policy requirements to close these gaps.