Putting Melbourne on the map

Biomedical Research Victoria has collaborated with Nature Index to produce an interactive map charting research collaborations at all of Melbourne’s universities. 

The Nature Index website is an open access platform owned by Springer Nature, publisher of Nature, with data published under a creative commons license.

The Nature Index tracks high quality research and collaborations by measuring the contribution of institutions and, by extension, cities and countries to a set of leading journals in the natural sciences.

The map carries a regularly updated feed of jobs and events in Melbourne from NatureJobs and includes data from a list of natural science journals. It will later be expanded to include articles from over 60 clinical medical titles expected to be added to the Index towards year end.

The Nature Index website explains:

“An institution’s contribution to these journals is its fractional count (FC), while article count (AC) is the number of an institution’s journal articles that appear in the Nature Index. When evaluating the collaborative effort between two institutions, a bilateral collaboration score (CS) is derived. This is sum of the FCs from articles with authors from both institutions.

“Local bilateral collaborations between institutions within the greater city area are represented by the lines on the map, while the top international bilateral collaborations are listed in a popup box of each institution. The collaborations of child institutions that are part of a larger institution are shown as dashed lines. In most instances, only the primary location of an institution is mapped.”