How ITS Research Intelligence Works
The platform separates institution identity, scholarly research metrics, trend calculations, quality gates and public rankings so users can see what each indicator does—and what it does not measure.
Institution identity
ROR is used as the canonical organization identity layer where available. OpenAlex supplies scholarly research metrics and links institutions back to ROR. Records are normalized before public use so alternate names and identifiers do not automatically become duplicate institutions.
Research Performance Score (v3)
One formula applies to every index-ready institution, using the five most recent complete calendar years: 25% research output, 25% citations, 20% h-index, 5% i10-index, 15% citation impact, 5% publication growth and 5% international-collaboration share. Volume indicators are log-normalized before weighting so the largest universities do not dominate linearly. Citation impact is the institution’s percentile on citations per work, reduced for institutions with fewer than 500 works so that small samples cannot win by chance; it is not field-normalized. When collaboration data is not yet available, the other weights are rescaled. Open-access share and topic diversity are published as separate rankings and do not affect the main score. The score remains research-specific and does not claim to measure teaching quality, student satisfaction, employability, finances or reputation.
Data-quality controls
The unfinished current year is never counted: the window always ends with the last complete year and moves forward each January. Open scholarly metadata sometimes records very large bulk deposits (datasets, repository items) in a single year. A year in which an institution’s recorded output jumps to more than three times its usual level while being at least 90% open access is scored at the institution’s usual level. The raw source data are kept unchanged, and every adjusted year is logged so it can be reviewed.
Momentum
Momentum emphasizes direction of travel. It uses recent publication and citation growth alongside current research scale. Growth values are bounded before scoring so a very small starting value cannot create an unrealistic advantage.
Public quality gate
An organization can exist in the database without becoming an indexable public page. University pages require an active education institution, country identity, substantial five-year output, multiple active research years, multiple topic signals and adequate data completeness. Country and field pages require minimum numbers of index-ready institutions. This is the core anti-thin-content rule.
Field intelligence
Field pages use OpenAlex topic classifications associated with institutions. The field score blends topic-signal volume, overall research performance and recent growth. It is not presented as a complete disciplinary ranking until deeper work-level field normalization is implemented and validated.
Updates and reproducibility
Scholarly metadata changes as affiliations, works and citations are corrected. ITS therefore records synchronization dates and treats rankings as dated analytical snapshots. The system never converts missing data into invented metrics.