Blog post

No one can read it all Half a century ago, it was possible for a researcher to keep abreast of the literature in their field. One could browse through most of the journals within the discipline, and probably a few outside, with a reasonable investment in time. But circumstances have changed. The world of publishing … Read more

An initial investigation into the visibility of Swiss Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in commercial bibliometric databases was published here in April 2024. It highlighted the importance of (1) metadata quality, (2) institutional identifiers, and (3) language disambiguation. These findings revealed significant differences between the platforms Dimensions, Scopus and Web of Science (WoS). This blog post … Read more

This blogpost covers the main findings and implications of a study of Swiss higher education institutions’ findability in commercial bibliometric databases, conducted within the project “Towards Open Bibliometric Indicators” (TOBI). It underscores the relevance of organisational identifiers and language disambiguation for the findability and visibility of Swiss HEIs in bibliometric databases. It also showcases the … Read more

“The beginning is the most important part of the work” Laotse Once upon a time – in 2009 to be more precise – a bibliometrics department was implemented within the realms of the Vienna University Library. This was a remarkable move, given that bibliometrics had not yet gained momentum in Austria at that time. Moreover, … Read more

The Impact Factor is Big Business Aside from the infamous H-Index (which “quantifies” researchers), the most widely known concept from scientometrics is the Impact Factor (IF), which “quantifies” journals. Currently owned by Clarivate, the Journal Impact FactorTM is both a brand and a big business. Many copycats have tried to compete with the IF, but … Read more

Today’s challenges in scientometrics include overemphasis on existing metrics and the need for improved interdisciplinary indices [1,2,3,5,8]. An interdisciplinary project team based at ETH Zurich, co-lead by Prof. Peter Egger (economist) and Prof. Ce Zhang (computer scientist), addressed this issue by developing a hierarchical classification system that categorizes publications into disciplines, fields, and subfields based … Read more

CoARA (www.coara.eu) is being adopted by a number of Swiss higher education institutions. The 10 principles of CoARA imply a profound change in the criteria for evaluating scientific research, and at all levels of this evaluation, in a systemic way. For a successful implementation, university management will therefore need the support of researchers within their … Read more

“More is better” surely also applies to the journal impact factor (IF), wouldn’t you agree? A paper published in a high IF journal clearly must create a significant impact in the research community. Or is that an oversimplification? Taking a closer look, we will see how an impact factor can go up and down unexpectedly. … Read more

Switzerland and the UK are partly barred from participation in the huge research programme Horizon Europe. This limits access to research funding for scientists in both countries and might hinder international collaborations in larger projects. The loss of these funding opportunities and a potential loss of EU collaborations might have a negative impact on these … Read more