SCImago

SCImago is a global reference in bibliometric analysis and open knowledge. Yet the academic ecosystem has long lived with an uncomfortable reality: research quality suffers when there are no clear, comparable, and legitimate mechanisms to assess integrity risks.

With SCImago IRIS, the organization tackles this challenge from a new dimension. The challenge wasn't just launching a platform—it was building a brand capable of sustaining a global standard, delivering trust, comparability, and judgment in a fragmented and sensitive environment.

The challenge was technical, but above all strategic and reputational: how to express integrity, rigor, and fairness without falling into a punitive or overly technical narrative.

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The need for a global standard for integrity

During the immersion phase we analyzed IRIS's context against other existing frameworks and initiatives. We spotted a recurring pattern: projects with good intentions, but with weak identities, complex messaging, and limited capacity to drive real adoption.

IRIS stands apart through a key structural element: the normalization of results, which allows institutions with very different profiles to be compared without bias from size, specialization, or publishing capacity.

From the start we understood that IRIS should not be communicated as just another tool, but as a trust infrastructure, aligned with SCImago's historical role as guardian of open knowledge.

Brand Strategy for a scientific integrity platform

SCImago IRIS's Brand Strategy is built around a clear value proposition: encouraging responsible research.

This positioning doesn't emerge in isolation. It's part of a broader brand vision that SCImago had already begun to deploy in projects like SCImago Media Rankings, where scientific knowledge becomes a tool to generate transparency and trust across other sectors. IRIS consolidates that logic, taking it to the core of academic research.

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From this foundation, IRIS positions itself as the first standard that normalizes the measurement of integrity risks in research, promoting ethical and honest practices that strengthen the scientific, social, and institutional impact of knowledge.

The narrative is built on two complementary dimensions:

• Ethics, as a commitment to quality and scientific truth.
• Honesty, as operational transparency and institutional responsibility.

The brand's role moves away from control and toward trust. IRIS enables better decisions, reinforces ecosystem credibility, and positions integrity as a structural asset of open knowledge.

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Scientific identity: perception, focus, and clarity

SCImago IRIS's visual identity is developed from the modular system created for the parent brand SCImago, ensuring coherence within the ecosystem and sufficient autonomy for the product.

The central concept is the iris as a symbol of perception and focus. Just as the iris regulates light to reveal what's essential, IRIS filters data complexity to offer clear, comparable vision.

• Graphic system: evolution of SCImago's characteristic graphics toward a more synthetic and geometric aesthetic, based on a 1:1 vertical repetition grid that enables multiple applications while maintaining coherence.
• Typography and color: a combination of academic rigor, legibility, and restraint that projects authority, reliability, and stability in digital environments.

The identity reinforces IRIS's positioning as a reference brand in scientific integrity, without stridency or artifice.

Digital product design for decision-making

SCImago IRIS's digital environment was born as a functional tool, not as a showpiece. Design prioritizes cognitive efficiency and clarity in reading complex data.

• Information architecture oriented to key profiles in the academic and institutional ecosystem.
• UX writing applied to explain complex concepts with precision and accessibility.
• Visual and technical integration with SCImago Graphica, ensuring consistency in data visualization and continuity with the rest of the SCImago ecosystem.

The goal was to reduce comprehension time and enable professional, reliable, and sustained use.

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Scientific branding for responsible research

With IRIS, SCImago expands its brand system by incorporating a new strategic asset aligned with its historical purpose. The brand architecture ensures that this new product not only fits, but reinforces SCImago's broader narrative as an organization in service of open, rigorous, and responsible knowledge.

IRIS is not just a platform. It's the expression of how scientific branding can organize complexity, generate trust, and prepare systems to scale without losing legitimacy.