Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A university research office uses InCites to benchmark its institution's Category Normalized Citation Impact (CNCI) against a self-defined peer group of comparator universities ahead of a strategic-plan review, alongside raw publication and citation counts rather than CNCI alone.
- Is an instance
A research funder uses InCites' Research Analytics Dashboard to identify which institutions and researchers have been most active and highly cited in a target research area before opening a new funding call, then cross-checks the shortlist against applicants' own reported outputs.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
Treating an InCites-reported metric such as CNCI as a complete, database-agnostic measure of research quality rather than one Web-of-Science-derived input among several.
- Not an instance
Comparing an InCites CNCI figure directly against a SciVal FWCI figure as though they were the same number from two vendors, without noting the two platforms draw on different underlying databases with different coverage.
Editorial commentary
InCites (formally InCites Benchmarking & Analytics) is Clarivate’s research-evaluation and benchmarking platform, built on top of Web of Science Core Collection publication and citation data. It packages citation-based indicators into dashboards for institutional benchmarking, strategic planning, and funder or collaborator analysis. Where Web of Science is the underlying curated bibliographic and citation database, InCites is the analytics and reporting layer that sits on top of it — a research office does not typically use InCites to look up a single citation the way it might search Web of Science directly; it uses InCites to compare performance across researchers, departments, institutions, countries, journals, or custom-defined peer groups over time. InCites is Clarivate’s direct counterpart to SciVal, Elsevier’s equivalent platform built on Scopus data.
What InCites does
Clarivate organises InCites’ functionality around several modules:
- Research Analytics Dashboard — benchmarking a researcher, group, department, institution or country’s publication output and citation impact against self-defined peer groups, with prebuilt and customisable reports.
- My Organization — lets an institution upload and curate its own researcher profiles and publication lists so InCites reports reflect institution-verified affiliations rather than relying solely on Web of Science address-field matching.
- Research Horizon Navigator — surfaces emerging and trending research topics from Web of Science data, intended to support strategic planning and horizon-scanning.
- Global Institutional Profiles Project — standardised, comparable institutional-level profiles used as the basis for cross-institution benchmarking.
InCites also draws on Clarivate’s own Journal Citation Reports for journal-level metrics, on Essential Science Indicators for field- and institution-level trend data, and can incorporate patent and grants data for broader impact analysis, alongside UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) mapping of publication portfolios.
Metrics available inside InCites
InCites is the primary distribution channel for several Web-of-Science-derived indicators developed by Clarivate’s Institute for Scientific Information, most notably Category Normalized Citation Impact (CNCI), an article-level indicator that normalises a set of publications’ citation counts against the world average for outputs of the same publication year, document type and Web of Science subject category. CNCI is the direct Web-of-Science analogue of Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI), the equivalent Scopus-derived indicator distributed through SciVal. InCites also reports collaboration-adjusted variants (Collab-CNCI) and journal-level indicators such as the Journal Impact Factor sourced from Journal Citation Reports. Because these indicators are computed from Web of Science coverage, they inherit Web of Science’s disciplinary, document-type and regional coverage rules and should be read as one database-specific input rather than a database-agnostic measure of research quality.
InCites vs SciVal
Research offices that subscribe to both platforms encounter InCites and SciVal as parallel, non-interchangeable analytics layers over two different underlying bibliographic databases. Both compute a normalised, field-adjusted citation-impact indicator (CNCI in InCites, FWCI in SciVal) using a broadly similar normalisation logic — citations relative to a world average for the same field, year and document type — but the two indicators are not directly comparable figure-for-figure because Web of Science and Scopus differ in journal coverage, subject-category assignment, and document-type classification. An institution reporting both figures in the same strategic document should state which platform each figure comes from rather than presenting them as interchangeable.
Worked examples
- A university research office uses InCites to benchmark its institution’s CNCI against a self-defined peer group of six comparator universities ahead of a strategic-plan review, reporting raw publication and citation counts alongside CNCI rather than CNCI alone.
- A research funder uses InCites’ Research Analytics Dashboard to identify which institutions and researchers have been most active and highly cited in a target research area before opening a new funding call, then cross-checks the resulting shortlist against applicants’ own reported outputs.
Common misuses
- Treating an InCites-reported metric such as CNCI as a complete, database-agnostic measure of research quality rather than one Web-of-Science-derived input among several.
- Comparing an InCites CNCI figure directly against a SciVal FWCI figure without noting that the two are computed from different underlying databases with different coverage, as though they were the same number from two vendors.
Related terms
See Web of Science for the underlying bibliographic database, Journal Citation Reports for journal-level indicators InCites also draws on, and SciVal for Elsevier’s Scopus-based counterpart platform.
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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