British Heart Foundation
Designing their internal bibliometric platform
The British Heart Foundation (BHF) is the UK’s largest independent funder of heart and circulatory research – with around £100m in research projects a year, they are one of the largest research charities in the country.
What did I do?
BHF asked me to help them design their new internal bibliometric platform and the metric framework to go with it. Built on open data and infrastructure rather than expensive proprietary tools, this bespoke platform would give them independence from vendors and flexibility to own a bespoke solution.
They wanted to understand what to measure, which data sources to trust, and how each indicator could be calculated. I worked with the team to turn high-level questions into a concrete set of metrics, mapped to specific open APIs and transparent methods, and delivered blueprint code and analysis files ready for Power BI. In this project I:
Finalised a long-list of use-cases and translated them into a definitive catalogue of around 30 metrics in areas such as productivity, translation, collaboration, excellence, etc.
Evaluated data sources and made pragmatic picks, documenting benefits and trade-offs.
Designed the data flow, and introduced document-level “flags” so downstream metrics remain explainable and easy to slice.
Wrote blueprint notebooks that called the APIs of multiple sources, linked the data, and produced clean CSVs for the BI model.
What the work achieves
This work enables BHF to measure a suite of metrics for their funded publications, and facilitates the evaluation of their historical early career awards. The platform directly links researchers in their portfolio with multiple external data sources, allowing BHF to more easily track the progress of the research of their early career researchers. Additionally, this integration allows BHF to automate the production of researcher profiles through connections between scientific databases and large language model APIs.
Shannon Quinney, Research Impact Evaluation & Communication Lead said:
"We had a clear vision for what we wanted to achieve but needed expert guidance to bring it to life. Jorge helped us navigate the complexities of data selection and metric design with a truly personalised approach. He didn’t just help us retrieve the data we had in mind, he introduced innovative ideas we hadn’t considered and helped us calculate indicators that genuinely reflect what matters to us. The turnaround was impressively quick, and even after the main project wrapped up, Jorge has continued to be incredibly helpful with any queries, no matter how small. His work has enabled us to build a flexible, open-source platform that will save us money and give us deeper insight into the impact of our funding."
BHF now has an internal, vendor-independent way to answer strategy questions – what’s being produced, where it lands in policy/clinical spaces, who collaborates with whom, and how Fellows progress in their careers. The platform can easily be updated as new data is produced, and it is modular, so it can be built upon as new open data sources become available.
More importantly, by relying mostly on open data and infrastructure, and being hosted internally, this bespoke platform should help them move away from other analytical solutions that require expensive paid subscriptions and rely on proprietary data. It will also give them the flexibility to calculate and display the things that truly matter to them – something difficult to achieve through “out of the box” platforms from paid subscriptions.
I want to thank Lucie and Shannon in the Impact team, and their colleagues in the data science team, for the opportunity to work with them. I hope that the data and insights derived from the platform will help them to continue demonstrating the huge impact that BHF’s funding has delivered, while reducing the costs needed to do so.