Applying Data Analytics and Visualization to Assessing the Research Impact of the Cancer Cell Biology (CCB) Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Objective: The purpose of this paper is to report on a research impact assessment (RIA) project conducted by the Health Sciences Library (HSL) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) for the Cancer Cell Biology (CCB) program in the institution’s cancer center through bibliometric data analysis and visualization.

Methods: A total of 642 publications produced by the CCB researchers from 2010 to 2014 was used as the original dataset. After the citations of these publications were cleaned and standardized, the citations were imported into selected bibliometric and other tools for quantitative analysis and visualization.

Results: The CCB program at the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center had significant scientific output and citation impact in the examined five-year period, which was quantitatively measured not only by the total number of publications and citation counts, but also by comparative citation impact measures. In addition, the research collaboration network visualizations helped identify the most productive CCB researchers, the most highly cited CCB researchers, the research groups composed by co-authors, and the internal and external research partners. Further, the research topic visualizations confirmed the alignment of publication concentrations with the five core areas on which the CCB program has been focusing.

Conclusions: The bibliometric data analysis and visualizations produced for this project were able to provide quick insights to the administrators in terms of identified patterns, trends, and gaps of the supported research activities.