Research Intelligence

Scholarly data says a great deal about where research is going, who is doing it and what it is worth. Most of it never reaches a decision. We build the platforms, classifications and indicators that turn it into evidence publishers and research organisations act on.

Built by the team that ran Nature Research Intelligence at Springer Nature.

For publishers ↓For research organisations ↓

30,000-topic classification at Springer Nature · Research intelligence for AIP Publishing · Two UKRI Metascience awards · Hyperscaler co-funding secured

/ WHY RESEARCH INTELLIGENCE, AND WHY US

We've built it at scale before

Our founder led Nature Research Intelligence at Springer Nature, growing it from six people to sixty. Its work included Nature Navigator, the NRI topic classification and Nature Index. We know which design choices get used and which get quietly ignored.

We build what we recommend

Strategy comes with a working platform: data pipelines, models, dashboards and APIs on your own cloud, handed over with the documentation and training your team needs to run it.

We hold research roles

On two UKRI Metascience awards we are a named Co-Investigator and Business Project Co-Lead, not a supplier. The methods we bring to clients are tested in open, peer-reviewed research.

AI with a human in the loop

Classification, extraction and matching are done with AI and checked by experts against your own judgements. You get calibrated outputs that a research office or editorial board can defend.

/ CREDENTIALS

Research intelligence we have built and are building

Founder's track record

Springer Nature

Nature Research Intelligence

Led Nature Research Intelligence with P&L responsibility for the commercial research intelligence portfolio, growing the team from six to sixty over four years and founding its strategy consulting practice for universities, funders and government research bodies.

/Nature Navigator, an AI-driven platform classifying research outputs and benchmarking institutional portfolios, which won a Red Dot Design Award in 2024
/The NRI topic classification: a machine-derived 30,000-topic hierarchy applied to hundreds of millions of scholarly documents
/Nature Index, the international indicator of institutional research output
/Nature Strategy Reports, the consulting practice's custom analyses of research strengths, opportunities and partners

Nature Index ↗NRI topic classification ↗Topic classification preprint ↗Red Dot Design Award ↗Nature Strategy Reports ↗

CrewCreate client

AIP Publishing

Research intelligence solutions and strategic advisory

A leading physical sciences publisher. Our work is built on the publisher's own data and runs on its own cloud.

/Research intelligence solutions that put the publisher's own data to work for editorial and commercial teams
/Ongoing strategic advisory on research intelligence and AI

AIP Publishing ↗

Named research roles

UKRI

Metascience: scientometrics for research assessment

Two of the seven projects the UK Metascience Unit is funding to build a basket of task-validated indicators for research assessment, as an alternative to asking an AI to judge research quality. Both run from September 2026 to August 2027.

/Paying it Forward (University of Sheffield): indicators of whether research outputs create or reuse code and data. CrewCreate leads the research data platform, LLM-based artefact extraction and metric computation
/SATERN (University of Strathclyde): indicators to detect multi-modal research fraud, including data and image manipulation
/Outputs, code and guidance are published openly

UKRI: the basket of indicators ↗UK Metascience Unit ↗University of Sheffield: the award ↗Paying it Forward on GitHub ↗

/ FOR PUBLISHERS

Learn which fields, institutions and authors your portfolio wins and loses, make editorial operations faster, and turn your content and metadata into products.

Find the Opportunity

AI & Data

30 days

Market Share & Portfolio Analytics

The Challenge

You know your submissions are up or down, but not where you are winning or losing against other publishers: which fields, countries and institutions, and why. Portfolio decisions get made on anecdote.

What You Get

Your share of published output by field, country and institution against competitors, joined to your own submissions data. Delivered as a dashboard your editorial and commercial teams can use, with the pipelines to keep it current.

Why Us

We delivered research intelligence of this kind for Nature Research Intelligence, and we deliver it for publishing clients today.

#market-share#portfolio#dashboards

Build & Deliver

AI & Data

100 days

AI Reviewer Finder & Peer-Review Capacity

The Challenge

Editors spend hours finding reviewers. The same small pool gets asked again and again, decline rates climb, and turnaround times slip. Whole fields have far less reviewer capacity than their submission volumes need.

What You Get

Ranked reviewer suggestions drawn from authorship and citation data, with conflict-of-interest checks and explanations editors can trust. Comes with an analysis of reviewer capacity by field, so you can see where the gaps are before they hit turnaround.

Why Us

We build reviewer-matching and capacity analysis on publishers' own authorship and citation data, drawing on the research graph behind Nature Research Intelligence.

#peer-review#reviewers#editorial

Build the Foundation

AI & Data

30 days

Topic Taxonomy & Classification

The Challenge

Your subject codes were set years ago, are applied inconsistently, and miss emerging fields entirely. Every analysis, from commissioning to sales, inherits that noise.

What You Get

A topic hierarchy derived from the citation graph, named and checked by subject experts, mapped to standard schemes such as field-of-research codes, and applied to your back catalogue and new submissions automatically.

Why Us

We led the NRI topic classification at Springer Nature, which applies 30,000 topics across hundreds of millions of documents, and we build citation-graph taxonomies for publishing clients.

#taxonomy#classification#metadata

Find the Opportunity

AI & Data

30 days

Commissioning & Emerging Topic Intelligence

The Challenge

Launches, special collections and editorial appointments are decided on instinct. By the time a field's growth shows up in your submissions, a competitor already owns it.

What You Get

Early signals of fast-growing topics, the authors and institutions leading them, and how your portfolio covers them. Gives you a shortlist for launches, special collections and editorial board recruitment.

Why Us

Trend detection over author affiliations and published output was a core part of Nature Research Intelligence, and we bring it to publishing clients today.

#commissioning#trends#special-collections

Prove the Value

AI & Data

30 days

Research Integrity Signals

The Challenge

Paper mills, manipulated images and fabricated data are getting harder to spot by eye, and a single retraction can cost a journal years of reputation. Integrity teams cannot read every submission.

What You Get

A proof of concept that screens submissions for data and image manipulation and other warning signs. It raises cases for your integrity team to review, with evidence attached, and never makes the decision itself.

Why Us

We are Business Project Co-Lead on SATERN, a UKRI-funded award developing indicators of multi-modal research fraud.

#research-integrity#screening#trust

Build & Deliver

AI & Data

>100 days

Research Intelligence Product Build

The Challenge

Your content and metadata could be worth more as a data product sold to universities and funders, but building one means product, data science and sales skills your publishing business does not have.

What You Get

A research intelligence offer designed and launched with you: the proposition, benchmarking methods, the analytics platform and the consulting model that sells it.

Why Us

We built Nature Research Intelligence into a sixty-person business, including Nature Navigator, which won a Red Dot Design Award in 2024.

#data-products#saas#new-revenue

/ FOR RESEARCH ORGANISATIONS

For universities, institutes and funders: benchmark your research honestly, show value beyond papers and citations, and build the data foundations that research assessment increasingly expects.

Find the Opportunity

AI & Data

10 days

Research Strategy & Benchmarking

The Challenge

Rankings and vendor dashboards tell you where you stand but not what to do about it. Strategy rounds end up arguing over the numbers rather than using them.

What You Get

Your research portfolio benchmarked against the peers you choose, by topic rather than broad subject, with the strengths, gaps and collaboration opportunities that matter for your strategy. Delivered with the analysts who did the work, not just a report.

Why Us

We founded the Nature Research Intelligence strategy consulting practice, advising universities, funders and government research bodies on using indicators in strategy.

#benchmarking#strategy#research-office

Build & Deliver

AI & Data

100 days

Research Outputs Beyond the Paper

The Challenge

Your researchers produce datasets, software, models and infrastructure that move their fields forward, but assessment still counts papers and citations. That work goes unseen and unrewarded.

What You Get

LLM-based extraction of the code, data and other artefacts your research has produced, linked to where they are reused, with indicators you can use in narrative CVs, REF preparation and internal reviews.

Why Us

This is the work of Paying it Forward, a UKRI-funded award led by the University of Sheffield, where CrewCreate is Co-Investigator and leads the data platform and metric computation.

#open-research#research-assessment#ref

Find the Opportunity

AI & Data

10 days

Responsible Indicator Design

The Challenge

You have signed up to responsible-metrics principles, but turning them into indicators your committees will actually use, and cannot easily game, is harder than writing the policy.

What You Get

A short, practical engagement that designs or reviews the indicators behind a decision, tests them on your data, and documents their limits, so that numbers support expert judgement rather than replace it.

Why Us

We oversaw Nature Index and are now developing and testing new scientometric indicators under UKRI's Metascience programme.

#responsible-metrics#indicators#policy

Find the Opportunity

AI & Data

30 days

Collaboration & Partner Discovery

The Challenge

Finding the right academic, industry or international partner for a bid or a centre still depends on who already knows whom. Strong partners outside your existing network go unnoticed.

What You Get

A map of the collaboration network around your priority topics, with candidate partners ranked by fit, track record and existing links to your researchers.

Why Us

We built collaboration-network analysis over author affiliations into Nature Research Intelligence's products and consulting work.

#collaboration#partnerships#networks

Build the Foundation

Cloud Platform

100 days

Research Data Platform

The Challenge

Every analysis starts from scratch: an export from one database, a spreadsheet from another, and nobody sure which version the last report used.

What You Get

A research data platform on your own cloud that joins open sources such as OpenAlex and Crossref with your CRIS, grants and HR data, with the pipelines, documentation and access controls to keep it reliable.

Why Us

We are building the research data platform and full-text corpus for Paying it Forward, and we run production data platforms for publishing clients.

#data-platform#open-data#infrastructure

Enable Your People

Enablement & Security

>100 days

Industry Partner for Funded Research

The Challenge

Funders increasingly expect a business partner who can build what the research depends on, but most suppliers can't hold a named research role, and most academic teams can't build production software.

What You Get

A partner who co-designs the bid, holds a named role such as Co-Investigator or Business Project Co-Lead, and delivers the platform, data and engineering, with outputs published openly.

Why Us

We hold named roles on two UKRI Metascience awards with the Universities of Sheffield and Strathclyde.

#grants#consortia#contract-research

/ HYPERSCALER CO-FUNDING

AWS, Microsoft and Google can pay for much of the first step

The cloud providers fund proofs of concept and platform builds that run on their infrastructure, including AI for publishing and research. We find the right programme, write the application and deliver the work. We have already secured AWS funding for an AI solution on a scholarly publishing platform.

Up to $400K available

AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP)

Up to $400K in funding for qualifying migration, modernisation, and AI workloads. Covers assessment, mobilisation, and migration phases. Stages 1 and 2 of our journey can be fully funded.

$25K PoC credits

AWS PoC & Innovation Credits

$25K in AWS credits for proof-of-concept and innovation projects. Covers infrastructure costs for Stage 3 Use Case Sprints, letting you validate AI value before committing to full delivery.

Assessment to deployment

Microsoft Azure Migration Program

Azure Migrate and Modernise funding for qualifying cloud migration and modernisation projects. Technical and financial support for assessment through to production deployment.

AI/ML & data workloads

Google Cloud Credits

GCP credits for qualifying AI/ML and data platform projects. Available through the Google for Startups Cloud Program and Google MAP equivalent programmes for established enterprises.

Talk to us about your research data

Whether you are a publisher wanting to know where your portfolio stands, or a research office preparing for the next assessment, the first conversation costs nothing.

Book a Meeting Contact Us