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Not applicable

Why aren't academics using Qlik Sense or Qlik View for research?

From what I've heard, and from the lack of relevant papers on Google Scholar, it seems that there are no academics using Qlik Sense for research. Is this true? If it is false, can you provide some counter examples? Note that I'm aware that some academics are using Qlik Sense for teaching, but that I'm interested in those using it for research.

11 Replies
marcus_sommer

Have you searched the same for QlikView? Qlik Sense is a quite new product and you need very good reasons to migrate a working qlikview enviroment to qlik sense.

- Marcus

Michael_Tarallo
Employee
Employee

Hi David - I will have someone look at this and I or someone else will get back to you.

Please mark the appropriate replies as CORRECT / HELPFUL so our team and other members know that your question(s) has been answered to your satisfaction.

Regards,

Mike Tarallo

Qlik

Regards,
Mike Tarallo
Qlik
Gysbert_Wassenaar

I think you'll find similar lack of results for most other BI and Data Discovery products from other vendors. You'd find SPSS from IBM a lot more since that's a statistics app even though it's available with Cognos BI now. And perhaps SAS which is also traditionally strong in statistics.

Also, I don't think it's very common for research papers to specify the products used for processing the results of research and even more rare to research commercial products at an academic level. To be honest I don't quite know what you expect to find.


talk is cheap, supply exceeds demand
swuehl
MVP
MVP

Hi David,

when you are asking for usage in research, are you looking for a research in the BI area, i.e. research on in-memory databases? Or using QS as a tool for research in other areas?

Just my 0.02 €:

If you are asking for the first,  I believe research will be done on a more "core-like" software, not on a final customer product where researchers will have to look at the results produced by a black box.

If you are asking for the latter, I believe there are better tools for do statistics and produce static output like graphs and tables to show evidence for a pre-stated thesis.

QS is for interactive business discovery using the associative logic.

I think these two are orthogonol ways of processing & looking at data.

Or maybe I misunderstood your question.

Regards,

Stefan

swuehl
MVP
MVP

There is a lot of research done e.g. on SAP HANA's in-memory DB, but I believe most research is done within the HPI in Potsdam, Germany and you can guess why they are focussing on HANA (just google for HPI Potsdam).

mgranillo
Specialist
Specialist

I think Gysbert is right.  Academics have a greater use for statistics packages such as Matlab, SAS, R, etc. This is because a higher level of empirical evidence is needed for their publications than what is possible in Qlik.

If I were an academic, I might use Qlik to get an initial overview of my data but I would never cite using Qlik in a publication.

Not applicable
Author

> If I were an academic, I might use Qlik to get an initial overview of my data...

This is along the lines of what I would expect an academic to do. I would expect them to, for instance, conduct a user study that shows that using Qlik end users can more quickly get an understanding of their dataset than using SAP or R. Or perhaps a case study showing where Qlik is preferred vs where a more statistically focused but less user-friendly program is preferred.

swuehl
MVP
MVP

This sounds more like a sales & marketing thing to me, than academic research.

Well, I am biased.

Not applicable
Author

Hahaha... I see your point.

This type of research is much more applied than developing new models to understand data or something more fundamental. However, there are whole fields dedicated to the usability aspects of human computer interaction, and I wouldn't tell them their work is just sales and marketing .  The examples I gave certainly sound like something Qlik sales and marketing would want, but there's also some scientific value in such a study. What good are the best tools in the world if only the most qualified expert can use them? They won't have a broad impact. So, studying whether current BI tools (e.g., Qlik) enable end users to make meaningful discovers could be valuable from a scientific point-of-view.

It seems though, from your and others' comments, no one is studying this aspect of BI tools.