Research Trends -
Research Trends is a newsletter providing objective, up-to-the-minute insights into scientific trends based on bibliometric analysis.
Issue 26 - January 2012
Welcome to the 26th issue of Research Trends.
Welcome to the 26th issue of Research Trends, in which we focus on a series of novel approaches to research assessment and bibliometrics. Two of these relate to mapping the structure of science, and three others to newly proposed indicators. Matthew Richardson opens the issue showing impressive visualizations of citation relationships between 19,000 journals indexed in Scopus. One of his maps identifies journals that connect research disciplines, in the same way as stones thrown into a river enable one to move from one bank to another. Still on mapping of science, Gali Halevi presents an interview with professor Katy Börner who is the curator of the exhibit Places & Spaces currently on display at the New York Hall of Science. Her maps apply a series of unique information visualization tools that enable a deeper understanding of global scientific, environmental and economic trends. Scientific migration and brain circulation are topics with high policy relevance, but have never been studied on a large scale. Until now. Andrew Plume presents the first part of an article introducing a new, bibliometric technique to study brain circulation, and applying it to a country as large and scientifically advanced as the UK. The need to develop tailor-made, novel indicators is also underlined in Gali Halevi’s report on the event “Research Evaluation Metrics — International and Local Perspectives”, organized at Bar Ilan University in Israel, in October 2011. She concludes that a successful research assessment process must include high-level decisions on what is being measured, and why; a careful choice of datasets; and rigorous analytics that capture the multifaceted aspects of scientific data. Assessment of journal performance is still one of the key applications of bibliometrics. In a full article Sarah Huggett gives a thorough discussion of the Faculty of 1000 (F1000) approach to evaluating the quality of biomedical scientific articles based on expert opinion. One analysis compares the F1000 expert ratings with a series of citation-based journal metrics. Finally, Judith Kamalski takes us to the science entertainment show Mythbusters that presents such highly original scientific experiments. She examines whether their impact can be traced in the scientific literature.
Kind regards, Henk F. Moed (Editor-in-chief)
Issue 25 - November 2011
Welcome to the 25th issue of Research Trends.
Welcome to the 25th issue of Research Trends, in which we focus on bibliometric data interpretation. Bibliometric indicators are derived from large databases, often using advanced methodologies. But the numbers themselves are not what count — the key issue is how they are interpreted. The articles in this 25th issue of Research Trends all illustrate the importance of a valid interpretation and the difficulties encountered in interpreting bibliometric results. The first article, by Henk Moed, Andrew Plume, M’hamed Aisati and Peter Berkvens, looks at the interpretation of trends in publication counts by country. They refer to an article published by a distinguished researcher in the field, Professor Loet Leydesdorff, who has written a short reply. Next, Judith Kamalski and Colby Riese show how differences in publication counts between individual researchers may say more about where they are in their scientific careers than about the quality of their research. Anne-Catherine Le Calvez reports back on a meeting on global university rankings organized by the European University Association (EUA), with a focus on how European universities perceive such rankings. The next article, by Matthew Richardson, reports on studies at the level of research groups showing how scale may influence their performance, especially the output per individual. Such analyses provide insights into what ‘critical mass’ means for research groups, and how it relates to productivity. One of the key techniques in the field of bibliometrics, co-citation analysis, is the subject of a study by Gali Halevi. She shows that this technique has not only had an impact on research in the library and information science community, but also on inventions described in patents filed by major technological companies, especially during the past decade. In the final contribution, Sarah Huggett provides us with some numbers on research articles dealing with the issue of data interpretation.
Kind regards, Henk F. Moed (Editor-in-Chief)
Issue 24 - September 2011
Welcome to the 24th issue of Research Trends.
Welcome to the 24th issue of Research Trends, in which we focus on the assessment of national and institutional research performance. As these articles demonstrate, this activity involves much more than simply creating one-dimensional rankings of world universities. Here we describe multi-dimensional approaches to ranking universities, and distinguish between top-down and bottom-up approaches to assessment of institutions, and illustrate how data on 'article downloads’ provide useful indicators of performance, in addition to citation data. A country-by-country analysis focuses on those with an emerging science base, and demonstrates differences in the extent to which their key institutions participate in “outward” versus “inward” collaboration networks. We also illustrate how citation impact can be influenced by the titles that authors chose for their papers, from how long they are to whether they contain exclamation marks. Finally we report on an important seminar — Mapping & Measuring Scientific Output — held recently in Santa Fe (New Mexico, USA).
Kind regards, The Research Trends Editorial Board
