A Curated Literature Database for Monitoring More Than 30 Years of Ansys Granta Product Usage

2026-02-20

AI Summary

This work addresses the challenge of quantifying the academic impact of commercial engineering software such as Ansys Granta, which is hindered by inconsistent citation practices and rapidly growing publication volumes. We propose the first reproducible, semi-automated framework that integrates DOI and citation parsing, expert annotation, and a relational database (Ansys Granta MI Enterprise) to transform heterogeneous usage evidence into a structured knowledge base. As of September 2025, the framework has compiled a multi-source literature repository comprising over 1,100 manually verified records, enabling rapid retrieval, systematic review reproduction, and technology landscape scanning. The resulting knowledge base reveals dominant application domains, key contributing institutions, and integration patterns within CAD/CAE/FEM environments, thereby facilitating systematic tracking and analysis of the long-term technical influence of commercial engineering software.

Technology Category

• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Knowledge Engineering
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Semantic Web
• Application Domains: Software Engineering

Application Category

• Semantics and Knowledge: Scalable techniques for the creation, curation, publication, maintenance, and consumption of large, Web-based, structured, reusable, knowledge graphs and ontologies
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Community question answering
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Querying, indexing, and retrieval in Web-related graphs

Abstract

Engineering and materials software is increasingly difficult to track in the scholarly and technical literature because publication volume is growing rapidly and software citation practices remain inconsistent. This is particularly true for the Ansys Granta product family, which is used for materials education, materials and process selection, sustainability-driven design, and enterprise materials information management. We present a structured and reproducible framework to consolidate evidence of \emph{operational} Granta usage and to support quantitative monitoring of adoption patterns, application domains, and technical impact. The framework is implemented as a curated reference database in \textit{Ansys Granta MI Enterprise}: bibliographic metadata are ingested semi-automatically (e.g., via DOI and citation-file parsing) and complemented by expert curation of usage descriptors (product, context, application domain, and technical depth), with relational links to authors and institutions. Downstream analytics are performed with Python, dashboards, and bibliometric/network visualization tools to enable reproducible querying and reporting. As of September~2025, the database contains more than 1{,}100 curated records spanning journals, conferences, theses, books, patents, standards, and reports, and supports rapid retrieval of validated case studies, reproducible literature reviews, and technology scouting. Example analyses highlight dominant domains, key institutions, and recurring integrations with CAD/CAE/FEM environments. Overall, the approach converts heterogeneous software-usage evidence into structured, analyzable knowledge to improve visibility of engineering software impact and to support evidence-based assessment and strategic decision-making.

Problem

• software citation
• materials informatics
• bibliometric analysis
• research software tracking
• Ansys Granta

Innovation

• software usage tracking
• expert curation
• bibliometric analysis
• structured knowledge base
• reproducible framework