Dimensions of analysis

• Characterise an actor's scientific and technological activity (in terms of volume, disciplinary or thematic profile, interdisciplinarity, etc.) and identify observed trends relative to comparable actors;
• Analyse production dynamics on a particular topic and identify the main actors, or emerging sub-topics;
• Identify strategic priorities and opportunities in a highly competitive environment.

These analyses are based on indicators of shares, growth rates, and disciplinary or technological profiles, as well as on interdisciplinarity indicators, specialisation indices and thematic mappings.

• Identify an actor's ability to produce research that is highly recognised in its discipline.
• Identify areas of excellence in an actor's scientific output, or its ability to progress in certain target areas of excellence. 

Scientific impact is assessed on the basis of an analysis of the citations received by an actor's publications. The number of citations received is normalised by scientific field, document type and year of publication.

Scientific excellence corresponds to an actor's contribution to the most highly cited articles worldwide. Centrality indicators may also be used to describe an actor's position within scientific networks. Scientific excellence is also assessed through an actor's contribution to the leading journals in a scientific field.

• Assess the impacts of research in measurable areas, in terms of technology (patent filing), clinical practice (introduction of a new treatment or care device), support for public policy (mobilising researchers' expertise to inform public policy) and, more broadly, transfer beyond the scientific community. 
• Highlight the usefulness of research work by identifying which work leads to knowledge transfer. 

The OST's analyses characterise the impact of research using two types of approach: analysis of knowledge transfer through citations of scientific documents in different types of source (patents, clinical pratice guidelines, clinical trials, public policy reports) and analysis of collaboration between academia, clinical practitioners, industry and policymakers.

 Publication rate* in OA by broad discipline, 2000-17  

• Measure the spread of responsible scientific practices across the whole scientific production process: 
→ openness of data and transparency of methods; 
→ openness of publications;
→ team management and production conditions;
→ integrity of dissemination conditions (particularly with regard to predatory journals).
• Identify biases likely to affect results, particularly in publication practices (choice of journals and publishers, self-citation…)

The OST builds innovative indicators to measure how responsible scientific practice is. As part of this, the OST has built a discipline-normalised publication openness indicator. Work is under way to measure the integrity of publication practices (such as publishing in predatory journals) .

• Understand how communities of research actors are structured and how they evolve. 
• Shed light on the mechanisms of knowledge production, the emergence of new topics or key actors, and the conditions conducive to innovation.
• Identify and track emerging scientific communities around strategic topics.
• Assess the impact of measures introduced to encourage collaboration. 

These analyses draw in particular on the modelling of scientific networks, in particular co-publication (or collaboration) networks and citation networks, in order to represent the circulation and dissemination of knowledge.

They make it possible to characterise the composition of communities (profiles and characteristics of actors) and to identify key actors (centrality measures, “bridging” roles between groups). Network analysis can be combined with thematic analysis to study the coevolution of social structures and scientific content.