Research Consulting and SIRIS Academic on a different approach to research intelligence
Universities and research policymakers are sitting on more data than ever. Bibliometric platforms, research information systems, dashboard after dashboard of outputs and citations and collaboration networks. And yet many of the strategic questions that research leaders most need to answer remain surprisingly hard to address.
The problem, more often than not, isn’t a lack of data. It’s that the questions worth asking are often the ones those tools can’t answer.
Research Consulting and SIRIS Academic have been developing a partnership around exactly this challenge. Here, Rob Johnson and Théodore Hervieux talk about what brought the two organisations together, and the kinds of questions they’re working on.
Rob, how did the partnership with SIRIS come about?
The questions that are hardest to answer are usually the ones that matter most: where do we genuinely have strengths compared to our peers? What are the areas where there’s real opportunity, and are we positioned to take advantage of them? How do we demonstrate that our work connects to the priorities we’re being asked to deliver against?
These aren’t simple queries. They cut across disciplines, they draw on multiple data sources, and they need someone who can interpret what the evidence means in context, not just retrieve it. The large proprietary platforms are useful for a lot of things, but they’re built around what their particular dataset can measure. When a client’s question doesn’t fit that, you need a different approach.
That’s what drew me to SIRIS. They’re working in a way that I recognise: building something genuinely bespoke around each client’s question, rather than fitting the question to an existing product. What they add is a level of technical sophistication – semantic analysis, custom classification, combining multiple data sources – that goes well beyond what most consultancies can offer.
Théodore, how does SIRIS describe what it does?
Unlike most data providers, who start from what their platform can easily measure, we start by asking: “What do you actually need to understand?” Then we work out what data and methods would genuinely answer that – open sources where they work well, proprietary or licensed data where needed, or something built from scratch where neither exists.
Many of the questions that matter most are framing problems before they are measurement problems: what counts as an emerging area, an interdisciplinary strength, a regional contribution? In those cases, the value is in tailoring the analytical framework to the question, co-designing categories with stakeholders where needed, and using the process itself to clarify what the institution means by its own priorities. We are not trying to replace reporting platforms; we are building strategic intelligence around questions that standard systems were not designed to frame.
What kinds of questions are you talking about?
Rob: Most organisations are grappling with some version of three things. They want to understand where the field is moving, and whether they’re ahead of it or behind it. They want to understand what they’re genuinely good at and how that compares with peers. And they want to know whether the work they’re doing connects to the things that matter and what it leads to: government priorities, funder agendas, regional needs, REF, but also industry collaboration, policy uptake, clinical guidelines, and forms of impact that standard reporting systems weren’t designed to capture. None of those is a simple query.
Théodore: Exactly. In our work we think in terms of question families: define, describe, compare, detect, align. But these are not technical categories. They express the underlying need. Sometimes it’s detecting what’s emerging before standard classifications have caught up. Sometimes it’s understanding how an institution compares internationally, whether its work connects to external priorities, or how its research is taken up through collaboration, innovation, policy or practice. Each of those requires a different analytical approach – you cannot answer all of them with the same tool.
Can you give some concrete examples of the kind of work this leads to?
Example 1: Emerging topics – what’s coming, and are you part of it?
Théodore: One of the most striking things we can do is detect areas of research that are growing, emerging, or receding – often before they appear in standard subject classifications. Research fields evolve faster than taxonomies do, and an institution might have genuine emerging strength in an area that does not yet have a neat label, making it invisible to standard reporting.
But the innovative part of the method is that we look beyond “topics” in the narrow sense. From titles and abstracts, we can extract several dimensions of research: the scientific theme, but also the methods being used, the objectives pursued, the expected impacts.
We can then position an institution within those dynamics: where are you well placed, where might you be ahead of the curve, and where are there opportunities you are currently missing?
Rob: When Théodore’s colleague showed us this work, that was one of the moments where I thought: “’Institutions are going to want to see that for themselves”. It’s also genuinely hard to replicate with a standard platform, because the whole point is that you’re identifying things that the standard classifications haven’t caught yet.
Example 2: International benchmarking – What are we genuinely good at?
Rob: We recently worked with a consortium of mid-sized universities. The question was essentially: where do we have common areas of strength when we look at ourselves compared to similar universities, and how do those strengths map to things the UK government has identified as priorities in its Industrial Strategy – life sciences, digital and technologies, defence, and so on?
It sounds straightforward, but it isn’t. What you find is that two institutions are strong in a particular area, the other two less so; or one has a real concentration of expertise but none of the others do; or there’s complementarity that nobody had noticed. The goal was to give institutional leaders a solid foundation for deciding where to collaborate and what to build together.
Théodore: This is one of the areas where we do a lot of work. Institutions often look inward very well, but they are not so good at looking outside. So the benchmark – comparing yourself not just against your own history, but against the wider research landscape or a carefully selected peer group – is extremely valuable.
The harder part is often defining what you want to be compared on. Many universities define their priorities around interdisciplinary scientific themes or societal challenges – sustainability transitions, health innovation, digital transformation. These are meaningful for strategy, but don’t exist as ready-made categories in any database. This is where custom classification becomes useful. We can work with the university to define the comparison on its own terms, then apply that consistently across the whole landscape – not to create a favourable lens, but to make the rules of comparison more precise.
The result is a benchmark that shows “how do we compare internationally on priorities we have chosen?” not just “how do we perform in chemistry or social sciences?”
Example 3: Strategic alignment – how does your activity connect to the world around you?
Théodore: Something we are very excited about at the moment is alignment analysis. We bring together a wide range of textual sources – policy reports, industrial strategies, regional plans, news sources, research outputs, funded projects – and extract from them a structured picture of the challenges being discussed and the priorities being set. That framework can then be mapped against the institution’s own activity: research outputs, funded projects, partnerships, curricula.
The output is a picture of where an institution’s activity already connects to external priorities, where the connection is present but not yet clearly articulated, and where there may be gaps or opportunities to discuss.
It can also be territorial. We have developed a geotagging method that extracts geographical information from research and policy texts that shows not just where researchers are based, but what places their work is actually about, the communities studied and the regions affected. Affiliations tell us where researchers work; geotagging tells us what places their research is about, and where it may have territorial relevance .
Rob: I think that one resonates particularly strongly in the UK right now. There is a lot of pressure on institutions to demonstrate relevance – to the industrial strategy, to REF, to regional partners. But actually understanding whether the work you’re doing connects to those priorities is genuinely hard. You can’t just run a keyword search across a policy document and a publication database.
What makes the partnership between the two organisations distinctive?
Rob: Part of it is capability. SIRIS brings the analytical depth – the semantic extraction, the challenge mapping – and we bring knowledge of the UK landscape, the bodies that matter, the priorities that are live, and how to turn the findings into something an institution can actually act on.
But part of it is also about the kind of organisations we are. We’re not large corporates with a platform to sell. Both of us are relatively small, embedded in the research community, and genuinely oriented around the client’s question rather than our own product. SIRIS is a foundation; we’re moving towards an employee ownership model. There’s something about that shared ethos – being close to the work, doing it properly, not trying to sell the same thing to everyone – that I think matters.
Théodore: I would add that we are not a black box. Our methods are transparent, but so is the way the framework is built. We work with domain experts and stakeholders throughout, we test assumptions, we discuss the limitations of what the data can and cannot tell you. The goal is not to produce more indicators. It is to build evidence that is credible enough to support real strategic conversations.
Research Consulting and SIRIS Academic will both be at ARMA 2026 in Harrogate. If your institution is working on questions that don’t fit neatly into standard reporting tools – about where you stand, where the field is moving, or whether your work connects to the priorities that matter – we’d welcome a conversation. Find us at the Research Consulting stand, or get in touch ahead of the conference.
Théodore Hervieux: theodore.hervieux@sirisacademic.com
Rob Johnson: rob.johnson@research-consulting.com
