RELX's Scientific, Technical & Medical market segment
Highlights from 2020
Elsevier serves the needs of scientific, technical and medical markets by organising the review, editing and dissemination of primary research, reference and professional education content. Growing from its roots in publishing, Elsevier facilitates insights and critical decision-making for customers across the global research and health ecosystems.
In 2020, remarkable progress has been made thanks to dedicated researchers and health professionals. The number of article submissions to our journals grew by over 25% to 2.5m submissions, almost double the total of articles that were submitted five years ago.
The number of articles published grew double digits. Elsevier's free Novel Coronavirus Information Centre saw over 200m downloads.
Here are the highlights.
Elsevier services fall into four categories: Primary Research, Databases & Tools, Reference and Pharma Promotion. This story looks at Primary Research and Databases & Tools. A full review is available in the 2020 annual report.
PRIMARY RESEARCH
Primary Research accounts for around half of Elsevier's revenues.
2020 saw continued strong growth both in article submissions and usage, with over 2.5m articles submitted, up 26%.
1.3bn articles were consumed by researchers, up 30% year on year.
Serving the global scientific research community, Elsevier published over 564,000 articles in 2020, 90% more than a decade ago.
Elsevier published over 81,000 Gold Open Access articles in 2020, a year on year growth rate of over 65%.
In 2020, Elsevier launched 115 new journals of which over 90% were Gold Open Access; growing the Elsevier portfolio to 500 Gold Open Access journals.
Elsevier’s portfolio of 2,650 journals is managed by more than 24,000 editors and many of its journals are the foremost publications in their field. They include flagship titles such as Cell Press and The Lancet family of journals.
Elsevier’s article output accounts for 18% of global research output while garnering approximately 27% of citations, demonstrating Elsevier’s commitment to delivering research quality significantly ahead of the industry average.
Research content is distributed and accessed via ScienceDirect, the world’s largest platform dedicated to peer-reviewed primary scientific and medical research. Elsevier has continued to invest in ScienceDirect and integrate new remote access methods to provide researchers with the ability to easily use its tools when working from home, safe in the knowledge that they are doing so securely, and that their privacy and data are protected.
DATABASES & TOOLS
Elsevier offers a suite of products for academic and corporate researchers. Significant products include Scopus, ClinicalKey and Reaxys.
Scopus enables its users to quickly find relevant and trusted research, identify experts and access reliable data, metrics and analytical tools to support confident decisions around research strategy.
Reaxys is a chemistry research and education database with chemical substance, properties, reaction and medicinal chemistry data for both bench chemists and data scientists supporting drug discovery and chemical R&D in industries such as pharmaceuticals, chemicals and academic & government. During the year, Reaxys strengthened its content enrichment and analytics capabilities.
Elsevier serves academic and government research administrators and leaders through its Research Intelligence suite of products. SciVal is a decision support tool that helps institutions to establish, execute and evaluate research strategies by leveraging bibliometric data from Scopus and other data types such as patent citations and usage data. Elsevier expanded its leadership position in research institution benchmarking analytics through further investment in its SciVal Topic Prominence in Science. Big data technology takes into consideration nearly all of the articles available in Scopus since 1996 and clusters them into nearly 96,000 global, unique research topics based on citations patterns. Elsevier continues to expand and enhance the quality of indicators for research evaluation and impact assessment. With the 2019 CiteScore release, Elsevier introduced an improved calculation methodology, providing a more robust, fair and faster indicator of research impact.
Elsevier’s flagship clinical reference platform, ClinicalKey is accessed in over 90 countries and territories, and by over 1,900 institutions in North America alone. ClinicalKey is a clinical knowledge solution designed to help healthcare professionals and students find the most clinically relevant answers through a wide breadth and depth of trusted content across specialties. This includes Elsevier’s vast collection of leading medical reference content, including over 550 clinical overviews that provide quick clinical answers and summaries, over 4.8m images and over 66,000 medical and surgical videos in a single, fully integrated site.
For healthcare professionals, Elsevier’s clinical solutions include Interactive Patient Education and Care Planning. Elsevier’s ClinicalPath provides clinical pathways delivering personalised, evidence-based oncology guidance at the point of care. ClinicalPath won the 2020 MedTech Breakthrough Award for Best Computerized Decision Support Solution for the second consecutive year. In commercial healthcare, consumer, provider and medical claims data is used to deliver leading identity, fraud, compliance and health risk analytics solutions for payers, providers, pharmacies and life sciences organisations.
In medical education, Elsevier serves students of medicine, nursing and allied health professions in multiple formats including E-books and digital solutions. For example, Sherpath, an adaptive teaching and learning solution for nursing and health education, provides highly focused, personalised and adaptive learning paths at over 400 institutions, supporting more than 50,000 enrolments. During the year, we saw strong demand for remote solutions and we set up remote proctoring for over 550 nursing schools. Sherpath saw strong growth, and Complete Anatomy, our 3D anatomy platform saw activity levels double. ClinicalKey Student is used by more than 100,000 students in over 170 medical and 130 nursing schools.
STRATEGIC PRIORITIES
Elsevier’s strategic priorities are to:
- Continue to increase content volume and quality;
- Expand content coverage, building out integrated solutions and decision tools combining Elsevier, third-party and customer data;
- Increase content utility, using ‘Smart Content’ to enable new e-solutions; combine content with analytics and technology, focused on measurably improved productivity and outcomes for customers;
- Continue to drive operational efficiency and effectiveness.
In the primary research market, Elsevier aims to deliver journal and article quality above the industry average at below average cost, leveraging the scale of our platform. We work directly with our customers to understand their objectives and help them reach their research goals in a way that is satisfactory from a content, service and economic perspective. Elsevier looks to:
- Enhance quality by building on its premium brands and grow article volume through new journal launches, the expansion of open access journals and growth from emerging markets; and
- Continue to broaden the range and quality of insights across research solutions with enhancements such as improved OA filtering capabilities, improved analytics capabilities for finding experts, integration of additional datasets for finding experts and institutional benchmarking.
In reference markets, Elsevier’s priorities are to expand content coverage, improve the user experience and ensure consistent and seamless linking of content assets across products.
Similarly, in health, Elsevier is developing clinical decision support applications utilising cognitive technologies and large image and text content repositories. These applications embedded in technology platforms will enhance the delivery of the right content, in the right care setting, to the right care providers. This will help health professionals perform their work better, make more accurate diagnoses, ensure appropriate care delivery and ultimately, save more lives.
In every market, Elsevier is applying advanced Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing techniques to help researchers, engineers and clinicians perform their work better. In 2020, Elsevier acquired SciBite, a semantic Artificial Intelligence company headquartered in Cambridge, UK, to help customers make faster, more effective R&D decisions, identifying key concepts such as drugs, proteins, companies, targets, and outcomes. Elsevier also acquired Authess, the Boston-based developer of an advanced performance-based competency assessment platform that evaluates how students solve complex, open-ended problems using ML models and data analytics. In December, Elsevier acquired Shadow Health, a Florida-based developer of virtual simulations in nursing and healthcare education.
Elsevier employs over 8,600 people around the world. Many of which began their careers in research and health. Elsevier shares the community's belief in science and humanities and what they can achieve. They are committed to quality and innovation to improve the value we deliver to researchers, research leaders, librarians, funders and healthcare professionals in an open, inclusive and collaborative manner:
Elsevier supports academic researchers as they seek to break ground with their discoveries and they are honored to disseminate their findings. Elsevier works to help them stay on top of the never-ending flow of research in their fields and related fields; provides insights that help find funding; identifies international, interdisciplinary and commercial collaborators; and manages data to ensure that their work is reproducible.
Elsevier supports librarians in their role as guardians of the quality of knowledge and knowledge dissemination to advance their institutional mission. They provide publishing and subscription options, quality content and tools that enable them to store and showcase their collections and share them openly.
Elsevier helps research leaders and funders understand their performance and the research landscape, identify researchers and cross-sector partners to advance their programs, recognize funding opportunities and manage the research enterprise.
Elsevier helps doctors and nurses improve the lives of patients. They provide algorithms to help healthcare providers to make faster, better decisions at the point of care and improve outcomes for patients. They also provide content and the digital tools to manage their administrative work more efficiently so they can focus on their patients’ treatment.
Elsevier works with health educators to prepare today's students for successful careers in medicine, nursing and health professions, providing world-class content and innovative teaching and learning technology that improves student outcomes.
Elsevier supports corporate R&D with information, data and modeling that allows them to save time, make better decisions and innovate at the speed and scale that society demands of them.
Elsevier brings together global communities to listen, support and partner towards open science and the betterment of society. As one of the world’s largest open access publishers, Elsevier is working with their communities to re-examine long-held traditions in scholarly communications and aspire to an ever-more frictionless research information system. With the Elsevier Foundation, they are committed to advancing diversity in science, research in developing countries and global health.
RELX is a global provider of information-based analytics and decision tools for professional and business customers.
We help scientists make new discoveries, doctors and nurses improve the lives of patients and lawyers win cases. We prevent online fraud and money laundering, and help insurance companies evaluate and predict risk. Our events enable customers to learn about markets, source products and complete transactions. In short, we enable our customers to make better decisions, get better results and be more productive.
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