Dimensions is a new database containing scholarly activity that can be accessed by all MU faculty, staff and students. The Division of Research, Innovation and Impact has subscribed to this online resource for the entire MU campus.
Similar to Scopus, Web of Science and PubMed, Dimensions provides searchable publications. However, it also includes published grants, filed patents, clinical trials and more. The magic of Dimensions is that organizations and people are uniquely identified, and their activity is linked to all available data types. This means less manual work for users putting different datasets together. Additionally, Dimensions houses the largest database of funded grants and builds relationships with individual funders to source data on regular intervals.
The linked content in Dimensions is partly available due to other sibling products hosted by the parent company, Digital Science. You may have used or have heard of many of these tools. One of the most popular is Altmetric, which brings in social media, news and other media mentions to individual documents in Dimensions.
Use cases
There are many uses for linked data types within higher education. Dimensions allows for grouping of funders, institutions, scholarly disciplines and more, making reporting and benchmarking easy to do. Dimensions also provides visualizations, such as network diagrams, easily exported or downloaded for printing.
Researchers can use Dimensions to find collaborators, see funded activity and identify trends in their topic of choice. Students can conduct literature searches using keywords, research categories and even geographic locations. Administrators can identify leaders by topic, build out research strategy and find useful data for decision-making.
Access
To access Dimensions, please visit https://app.dimensions.ai/ and register with your @missouri.edu email address. You will be rerouted to a single sign-in authentication screen.
Support and resources
The MU Research Analytics team manages the Dimensions subscription and offers training and tools:
- Access our published resources.
- Email Research Analytics with questions.
Dimensions also offers support for its products with searchable articles and previously asked questions. You can submit a ticket and Dimensions support will respond within a few working days.