Research Portals: Status Quo and Improvement Perspectives

Research portals are a means to present, discuss, and advance scientific findings. They are web-based knowledge management tools for research communities. Research portals foster collaboration among a community of scientists, research funders, and political decision-makers. However, research communities might not possess the knowledge and experience required to design a research portal. The authors support them by analyzing the status quo of existing portals and providing respective improvement perspectives. The authors ask what typical characteristics of such portals are and how these characteristics can be used to evaluate the advancement of individual portals and they seek to distinguish classes of differently advanced research portals and determine their status quo. The authors’ research is based on a systematic web search, during which the authors identify 813 relevant research portals. Following a multi-method approach, they assign each research portal a previously distinguished class of advancement. The authors conclude that research portals generally only offer basic functionality and discuss functionality that is underrepresented in this pool of analyzed research portals and elaborate on improvement perspectives in 11 feature dimensions.