Swiss Year of Scientometrics SYoS
a project funded by swissuniversities
We are delighted and excited to announce the first Swiss Open Academic Data (SOAD) Day, taking place on Wednesday, 10 September 2025, at ETH Zurich. This event will bring together researchers and practitioners active in Switzerland to explore Open Academic Data – how to use it, share best practices, and build a strong community. The … Read more
EPFL and ETH Zurich are pleased to introduce the emerging Swiss Open Academic Data (SOAD) community. Our goal is to bring together academic professionals from across Switzerland to explore the many ways open academic data can drive innovation—be it through sharing real-world use cases of how Swiss institutions leverage open data, improving overall data quality, … Read more
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
