Universities UK and Elsevier map citations in industrial strategy areas

Universities UK (UUK) and publishing and analytics company Elsevier have released a dashboard showing the citation performance of UK universities – those 142 institutions which are UUK members – between 2021 and 2025.

The analysis is based on UK-affiliated publications indexed in Scopus, which have been classified to seven of the eight industrial strategy sectors, and associated “frontier industries”, using a generative AI workflow. Research categorised as belonging to the defence sector has not been included, as a “significant share of directly defence-related work is classified and does not appear in publication data.”

The mapping includes a “relative research activity index” for different regions in the different fields, which is said to measure research specialisation (that is, whether citations in that field are over- or under-represented compared to the UK average).

It’s suggested that the tool can support the identification of gaps between regional research and economic strengths for further investigation. For example, northeast England has a high level of financial services research activity, but below-average economic specialisation in that sector, which “could indicate growth potential.”

The accompanying press statement argues that the data shows how UK universities were delivering the government’s industrial strategy “years before it was written”:

“Between 2021 and 2025, UK research in high-growth sectors was consistently cited more often than the global average: life sciences research was cited around 170% above the world average and digital and technologies 51% above. Financial services research grew faster than any other sector, expanding by 36.2% over five years; before financial services was formally announced as a priority growth sector.”