Interview
Making research connect
Nandita Quaderi, editor-in-chief of the Web of Science, champions objectivity, selectivity and data integrity
institutions and research funders need to monitor, measure, and make an impact in the world of research. It covers 155 million records, 34,000 journals and 1.6 billion cited references. We offer more than a century of curated, essential, accurate, consistent data indexing, and we make research connect. I could see no better place to improve the research intelligence available for the academic community. Originally conceived by Eugene Garfield,
Tell us a little about your background and qualifications? I trained as a scientist, was awarded my degree in Chemistry from Oxford and a PhD in Molecular Genetics from Imperial College, London. I then completed a post-doctoral
fellowship at the Telethon Institute for Genetics and Medicine in Milan, Italy, where I cloned a gene, MID1, which causes a rare birth defect called Opitz syndrome. I went on to establish my own research group, sponsored by the Wellcome Trust, to study the role of MID1 during embryonic development at the MRC Centre for Developmental Neurobiology at King’s College, London. Towards the end of my five-year
fellowship, I began to realise that although I found the intellectual challenge of working in academia extremely rewarding, the limitations on available funding meant it was unlikely that I would be able to realise my personal ambitions. I started investigating options outside the lab that would allow me to remain connected with the research community, and was hearing more and more about an exciting new development called open access (OA) publishing.
I joined BMC, a pioneer of OA, as an
acquisitions editor in 2005. These were still the early days of OA and there was a lot of work to be done to counter the misconceptions and mistrust regarding OA. I progressed to editorial director, and from there I moved to Nature Research, taking responsibility for the portfolio of OA journals.
How did this lead to your current role? I have relied on the Web of Science (as it is now and in its previous incarnations)
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from my first day as a PhD student to my last day as publishing director at Nature Research. I jumped at the opportunity to take on the role of editor-in-chief. I have overall responsibility for the editorial decisions made by the team of Web of Science editors and for our editorial strategy and polices. I also play a key role in the newly revitalised Institute for Scientific Information, the ‘university’ of the Web of Science Group, which informs and supports best practice, analysis and interpretation of research trends and performance. In the digital era, the amount of information we are exposed to is
“Researchers need a place where they know content has been rigorously assessed”
enormous – this includes the rapidly expanding number of scholarly publications and published research articles. Researchers are suffering with information overload and need a place where they know the content has been rigorously assessed, can be trusted and is comprehensive and well-organised. The importance of an authoritative, selective resource such as the Web of Science Core Collection is becoming ever greater, and so is our responsibility for providing certainty and making the ‘right’ decisions. The Web of Science Group (which is part of Clarivate Analytics) provides the tools and resources researchers, publishers,
the Web of Science has evolved over decades in response to technological advances and changes in the publishing landscape, but there are now opportunities for more substantial change in what we offer, and how we interact with our customers.
The Web of Science was once the only player in its field. Now there are a few more competitors, as everyone jumps on the importance of data. How do you stay competitive? We are unashamedly selective but remain fair and objective. Editorial decisions are made by our global team of in-house editors, who have no affiliations to publishing houses or research institutes, so there is no bias or conflict of interest in decision making. Each editor is responsible for specific subject categories and has a deep, nuanced knowledge of journals in their field. This contrasts with competitors, who rely on algorithms or delegating aspects of editorial decision- making to the research community. Although we are selective in choosing which titles we include, we are comprehensive in our indexing of these titles and provide end-to-end coverage of scholarly content for every journal, book and conference proceeding selected for inclusion in the Web of Science Core Collection. We know that hugely
important decisions are made on the basis of our data, and we offer certainty – as much as you can in the ever- changing fields of science and discovery. We continuously curate
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