A transparent, reproducible methodology

Built on OpenAlex

Connect51 is built on OpenAlex, the open catalogue of the global research record — over 46 million works, with their authors, institutions, funders, and citations. Because the source data is open, every figure we show can be traced back to its origin.

Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI)

Raw citation counts favour large, established fields. FWCI normalises citations against the world average for the same field, year, and document type, so a value of 1.0 means world-average impact and 2.0 means twice the world average. This lets you compare a mathematician and a microbiologist on a level footing.

The h5-index (h-5)

The h5-index is the h-index measured over the last five complete years: an entity has an h5-index of h when h of its publications from that window have each been cited at least h times. It rewards recent, sustained output — consistent, well-cited work — rather than a handful of older, highly cited papers.

Standing

Standing is our composite measure of an institution’s pull in a field — combining output, citation impact, and the strength of its collaboration network. It answers a question rankings can’t: where does this institution genuinely lead?

A documented subject taxonomy

We map every work to a custom Division and Subject taxonomy so benchmarking is consistent and comparable across institutions. The full taxonomy and every calculation are documented — reproducible by anyone with access to OpenAlex.

Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

We tag every work against the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals using OpenAlex’s open SDG classifier. It is a multilabel model: each goal is scored independently from 0 to 1, so a single paper can map to several goals — or to none.

We only count a goal when its score is 0.4 or higher. Below that threshold the false-positive rate climbs steeply — the model starts tagging anything that mentions “water” with clean-water goals, or “city” with sustainable-cities — which is noise rather than signal. Because SDG tags feed institutional rankings and sustainability reporting, we favour precision over recall: a missed tag is less damaging than a spurious one. The 0.4 cutoff is deliberately conservative and empirically supported — independent studies that reviewed score distributions with expert input have landed on the same value.

Why transparency matters

Research leaders make high-stakes decisions on this evidence. That is why our methodology is public: so you can trust the numbers, and defend them.