SciVal — CASRAI

SciVal

A subscription research-analytics platform, owned and sold by Elsevier, built on Scopus abstract and citation data, that lets research institutions, funders and government bodies benchmark research performance, track collaboration, and analyse societal and funding impact at the level of a researcher, department, institution, country or custom peer group. It is a reporting and benchmarking layer on top of Scopus rather than a separate bibliographic database of its own -- everything SciVal shows is ultimately traceable back to a Scopus record.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 18 Jul 2026

Worked examples

Is an instance

A university research office uses SciVal to benchmark its institution's FWCI against a self-defined peer group of six comparator universities ahead of a strategic-plan review, alongside raw publication and citation counts rather than FWCI alone.

Is an instance

A funder uses SciVal's funding-analytics module to identify which institutions have historically been most active in a target research area before opening a new funding call, then cross-checks the resulting shortlist against applicants' own reported outputs.

Looks similar, but isn't

Not an instance

Treating a SciVal-reported metric as a complete, database-agnostic measure of research quality rather than one Scopus-derived input among several.

Not an instance

Ranking individual researchers for hiring or promotion using SciVal-reported FWCI without accounting for small-sample instability at the individual level.

SciVal is Elsevier’s research-analytics platform, built on top of Scopus data, that packages citation-based and impact metrics into dashboards for institutional benchmarking, strategic planning, and funder/collaborator analysis. Where Scopus is the underlying curated abstract-and-citation database, SciVal is the analytics and visualisation layer that sits on top of it — a research office does not typically query SciVal for a single citation count the way it might query Scopus directly; it uses SciVal to compare performance across researchers, departments, institutions, countries, or custom-defined peer groups over time.

What SciVal does

Elsevier organises SciVal’s functionality into three broad areas:

Research analytics — benchmarking a researcher, group, department or institution’s publication output and citation impact against peers, identifying collaboration patterns and potential collaborators, and surfacing emerging or trending research topics.
Impact analytics — tracking how research connects to policy documents, patents, mass media coverage, and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), intended to show impact beyond the academic literature itself.
Funding analytics — surfacing funding opportunities and analysing funders’ historical priorities and peer institutions’ funding strategies.

To support these, SciVal draws in supplementary datasets beyond Scopus itself, including policy-document data (Overton), patent data (LexisNexis IP DirectData), mass-media mentions, and awarded-grants information, plus bibliometric inputs used in major university ranking methodologies (Times Higher Education, QS, U.S. News).

Metrics available inside SciVal

SciVal is the primary distribution channel for several Elsevier-published, Scopus-derived metrics that research offices encounter as named indicators in their own right, most notably Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI), an article-level indicator that normalises citation counts against the world average for outputs of the same publication year, document type and subject field. SciVal also provides the SDG-mapping queries used to classify a portfolio of publications against the UN Sustainable Development Goals — see SDG mapping (research output) for how that classification works and its known limitations. Because both indicators are computed from Scopus coverage, they inherit Scopus’s disciplinary and regional coverage biases and should be read with that dependency in mind, not treated as database-agnostic ground truth.

Worked examples

A university research office uses SciVal to benchmark its institution’s FWCI against a self-defined peer group of six comparator universities ahead of a strategic-plan review, alongside raw publication and citation counts rather than FWCI alone.
A funder uses SciVal’s funding-analytics module to identify which institutions have historically been most active in a target research area before opening a new funding call, then cross-checks the resulting shortlist against applicants’ own reported outputs.

Common misuse

Treating a SciVal-reported metric (FWCI, publication counts, SDG alignment) as a complete or database-agnostic measure of research quality, rather than one Scopus-derived input among several that responsible-metrics guidance (e.g. DORA, the Leiden Manifesto) recommends combining with qualitative peer review.
Using SciVal benchmarking output to rank individual researchers for hiring or promotion decisions — Elsevier’s own documentation and the broader responsible-metrics literature caution against using citation-normalised indicators like FWCI at the level of an individual with a small publication count, where sample size makes the metric unstable.

SciVal, Scopus, and other Elsevier analytics products

SciVal is a separate product and subscription from Scopus, though access is often bundled by institutions that license both. It should not be confused with Scopus’s own built-in author/affiliation analytics views, which offer lighter-weight benchmarking without a separate SciVal licence, or with third-party analytics platforms such as InCites (Clarivate, built on Web of Science) or OpenAlex-based dashboards, which draw on different underlying databases and will not necessarily reproduce the same counts.

References

Elsevier, SciVal product overview (elsevier.com/products/scival).
Waltman L, ‘A review of the literature on citation impact indicators’, Journal of Informetrics, 2016.

Use in your systems

JATS XML <role> element

xml

<role vocab="credit"
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      vocab-term="SciVal"
      vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/scival" />

Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)

json

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