Figure 1. Front page of the Research.fi service. © Ministry of Education and Culture, https://research.fi, 9 December 2021.
Research.fi (Tiedejatutkimus.fi) is a service provided by the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture that collects and shares information about research in Finland. The information featured in the service is automatically searched for in sources such as various systems of universities, research institutes and funders and saved in the National Research Information Hub, with Research.fi as its externally visible service and user interface. The service was commissioned in 2020, and some of its key content and functionalities were still in development in the spring of 2023.
Information provided by the service
The service offers a wide range of information related to Finnish research available from the systems of Finnish research organisations and funders. As supplying various research information is voluntary, aside from publication information, the information available through the service do not offer a comprehensive overview of the entire field of Finnish research.
The service includes or will include the following information:
- Publications
- People (beta in spring 2023)
- Projects
- Research data
- Infrastructures
- Funding calls
- Organisations
The service also offers a Figures on science and research section that has information on Finnish research funding, human resources, publishing activities and scientific citation impact collected from different sources.
You can find out more about the content of these services in their service descriptions.
Research.fi as a source of publication metrics
As the service contains comprehensive metadata of publications by Finnish institutes of higher education and research institutes, it is a useful source for reviewing and comparing the publication activities of Finnish research organisations. With regard to analyses, however, the Vipunen Education Statistics Finland service offers more diverse options for utilising the publication metrics on a national level, also providing the option to download the materials. Unlike the Research.fi portal, Vipunen offers the chance to view the publication activities in Finland and by Finnish research organisations also based on the data of the Web of Science and Scopus databases.
The Research.fi contains publication information starting from the 1960s, but more extensively data has been collected since 2011. At the time, reporting publication information became mandatory for universities and the next year for universities of applied sciences, too. Collecting publication information is voluntary for other research organisations.
Even though the service is the key source for examining the publication activities of Finnish research organisations based on its content, it still has some shortcomings from the perspective of publication metrics. As of spring 2022, mass downloading of data from the service was not yet possible, which means that sets of publications cannot be transferred to other tools for further processing. However, thanks to the fairly versatile filtering options, the search results can be visualised, which increases the usability of the service.
In the spring of 2022, the visualisation allowed for the data to be reviewed from the following perspectives:
- Year of publication
- Field of science
- Main field of science
- Organisation
- Publication type
- Publication country
- language
- Publication Forum level
- Open access
Figure 2. Example of the visualisation of publication information via the Research.fi service regarding open access. © Ministry of Education and Culture https://research.fi, 7 February 2023.