Ludo Waltman

Over the past two decades, the open access movement has made significant progress in promoting the free

 accessibility

and

 reusability

of scholarly publications. About half of the publications from recent years are free to access and reuse. However, are accessibility and reusability sufficient for a well-functioning system of scholarly publishing?

Publications should be FAIR

Vladimir M. Moskovkin

The origin of the phrase "publish or perish" was first questioned by Eugene Garfield (1996). He wrote that he had used the phrase in his speeches for thirty years, but had not heard anything about its origin. He consulted professors, librarians, dictionaries, and the Internet, but never found out who first suggested the phrase.

Origin and evolution of the "publish or perish" phenomenon

Dmitry Kochetkov

Since their inception in 2003, global university rankings have gained increasing prominence within the higher education landscape. Originally designed as marketing and benchmarking tools, the rankings have transformed into influential instruments for research evaluation and policymaking.

The Role of University Rankings in Research Evaluation Revisited

Tjitske Holtrop

Laurens Hessels

Ad Prins

The world of research evaluation is changing. In particular, we observe a growing need in research organizations for interactive, formative and tailor-made evaluation services. In response to this need, a team of CWTS colleagues has developed a new approach in collaboration with Ad Prins that we call the Evaluative Inquiry.

Evaluative Inquiry I: Academic value is more than performance

Karlijn Roex

Giovanni Colavizza

The World Health Organization has declared a COVID-19 ‘infodemic’: an overabundance of information which is often mixed with rumours and misinformation. In light of this, CWTS researchers Giovanni Colavizza and Karlijn Roex are conducting a study in which they investigate how science is communicated during the coronavirus pandemic.

Survey: Doing science in times of COVID-19

Inge van der Weijden

Christine Teelken

Academic organisations have changed substantially in recent decades in terms of their tasks, structure and culture due to increased internationalisation, lower government influence and funding, and larger influence from external stakeholders. Like other public organisations, universities are increasingly financed in an output-oriented manner, and therefore emphasis on performance has grown.

Precarious careers: postdoctoral researchers in the Netherlands

Leiden Madtrics

Every four years the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) and the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) join forces to organize the largest conference in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) in the world. From 16 to 19 July, 2024 the conference is hosted by the Athena Institute in Amsterdam.

CWTS at EASST-4S in Amsterdam

Blog team

Five years ago, we welcomed you to Leiden Madtrics through our first blog post. With the new blog, we wished to establish an active and engaging platform for our institute and our field to express ourselves – other than through scientific publications.

Celebrating 5 years of Leiden Madtrics

Qianqian Xie

CWTS is an interdisciplinary institute at Leiden University with a diverse multinational academic culture. PhD candidates, early career researchers, and visiting scholars from around the world gather at CWTS to pursue their research journeys. The journey can be an inspiring yet challenging experience.

Introducing the CWTS ECR/PhD Council

Cathelijn Waaijer

Julia Heuritsch

Increasing numbers of doctoral graduates work outside academia. However, a PhD degree has been often regarded as the gateway to an academic career, which is also considered as the ‘default’ career for PhD graduates. In the same vein, careers outside academia are seen as ‘alternative careers’. Still, in many countries, more PhD graduates work outside academia than within academia.

Skill gaps of PhD graduates

Ivo de Nooijer

I’ for invention   Academic researchers and inventors are explorers – boldly going where no one has gone before. Most people agree on this. However, the relevance of their discoveries or breakthroughs is perceived very differently by different groups, at least when it comes down to technology transfer of that invention from universities to companies.

University technology transfer: 'it's not a business, but run it like a business‘

Leiden University

Nees Jan van Eck

Classifying research publications into research topics or research areas is crucial for many bibliometric analyses. While there are lots of approaches for classifying publications, most of these approaches lack transparency. Although there are exceptions (see here and here), these approaches are typically based on data from proprietary sources or they rely on non-transparent algorithms.

An open approach for classifying research publications

Sarah de Rijcke

Ed Noyons

Academic research has become increasingly complex, multidisciplinary, collaborative, and transnational. The institutions that underpin research - including communication and evaluation systems - are trying to keep up, with varying levels of success. At the same time, our society is facing major challenges, including existential global health, welfare, and sustainability issues.

Introducing the CWTS knowledge agenda 2023-2028

Serge Horbach

Michael Ochsner

Wolfgang Kaltenbrunner

The idea for this blog post emerged in the context of a special issue with the online journal

 Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics

. We, a group of researchers that can broadly be associated with science &amp; technology studies and meta-research, were invited by Frontiers to guest edit what they call a ‘Research Topic’, suggesting it could focus on innovations in peer review practices.

Reflections on guest editing a Frontiers journal

At CWTS we are currently working on the development of our new knowledge agenda, a strategic plan for our center for the next six years. As part of this process, we are having lots of discussions, both internally within our center and with external colleagues and experts. While it will still take a few more months before we can share the outcomes of this process, we can already provide some impressions of the types of ideas we are discussing.

Dreaming at CWTS

The event   SciCon 2022 has been an online event seeking to bring together members of the academic metascience community and DeSci, to discuss some of the issues that exist in scientific research and highlight how DeSci efforts might contribute to improve the way we do science. SciCon has been organized by one of the leading DeSci initiatives: ResearchHub.

SciCon 2022: A look at Decentralized Science

Ingvild Reymert

The use of metrics is a hot topic in science, and scholars have criticized metrics for being more driven by data than by judgements. Both the Leiden Manifesto and the DORA-declaration, signed by thousands of organizations and individuals, have expressed concerns about the use of metrics on individuals.

How important are bibliometrics in academic recruitment processes?

Zeynep Anli

Taking place in the beautiful sunny Lisbon, PIDapalooza 2020 feels like a festival from the start. With free festival t-shirts, wrist bands and a Nails and Instant Tattoos corner, participants easily got into the fun mood of the event. Some of those who have attended the previous editions of the event were wearing festive hats and t-shirts from the previous edition of the festival. I also picked up my first PIDapalooza merch.

PIDapalooza 2020, Lisbon

Anna van ‘t Veer

Thed van Leeuwen

Dan Rudmann

Leo Waaijers

Imagine academic publishing that is fast, transparent, and free. Is that a pipe dream or something within reach? We already have preprint publishing (fast), open peer review (transparent), and diamond/overlay journals (free). If we could connect these disparate initiatives, would that make our dream come true? And how could this best be done? These are questions that are currently being discussed by us and others at Leiden University.

"Smart alone, brilliant together"

Maria Amuchastegui

Kean Birch

When Wolfgang Kaltenbrunner, a researcher at Leiden University’s Centre for Science and Technology Studies, stumbled upon the Twitter feed STS Title Bot, he was immediately struck by its creativity and effortless verisimilitude. Despite being generated by an automated algorithm that has apparently been fed with data obtained through text mining, many titles could easily pass for actual publications in major STS journals.

Is there a typical journal article in the field of science and technology studies?

Background: Russian Academic Excellence Project 5top100

The Russian Academic Excellence Project 5top100 is a Russian excellence initiative in higher education that ran from 2013 to 2020. The aim of the initiative was to place five Russian universities in the top 100 of global university rankings. The goal was not achieved; in political and academic discourses, there are conflicting assessments of the results of the project.

What Affects Research Productivity: View from Inside the University

Jennifer D'Souza

Search has long been revolutionized by knowledge-graph-powered services such as the Amazon Marketplace in e-commerce, or Open Street Maps in the cartography and navigation services domains, to name just two examples. Inspired by such knowledge graph (KG) success stories in the general domain, such technology is now being realized over scholarly knowledge as well.

Structuring Natural Language Processing Contributions in the Open Research Knowledge Graph

Wout Lamers

Kevin Boyack

Vincent Larivière

Cassidy R. Sugimoto

Dakota Murray

Whether in publications, seminar Q&amp;As, or on Twitter, scientists tend to disagree. Although many topics have broad consensus—human-caused climate change and the link between smoking and cancer being but two—even the most settled knowledge was at once the subject of debate. The history of science is littered with such examples.

A first step in quantifying disagreement across science

Ismael Rafols

‘Convergence’ as knowledge integration for grappling with societal challenges   Last October the US National Academies held a workshop (available here) to gather views on how to better measure and assess the implications of interdisciplinarity, or convergence, for research and innovation.

Knowledge integration for societal challenges: from interdisciplinarity to research portfolio analysis

Jackie Ashkin

Why is it so difficult to think of new possible worlds?

This is a question Marta Hejer and Wytske Versteeg ask in a recent paper for

 Territory, Politics, Governance

. It is a question I ask myself almost every day. Hejer and Versteeg contend that 'use of fossil fuels is deeply embedded in our societal values and everyday routines' and that 'as a consequence, we lack coherent imaginaries of alternative post-fossil futures'.

Why is it so difficult to think of new possible worlds?

Vít Macháček

Márcia R. Ferreira

Nicolás Robinson-García

Martin Srholec

Rodrigo Costas

In recent years, bibliometric databases have substantially improved the consistency and quality of the metadata extracted from publications, particularly the author-affiliations linkages from scientific publications. Furthermore, author-name disambiguation algorithms have been implemented for most large bibliometric databases, such as Web of Science, Scopus, and Dimensions.

Where do scholars move? Measuring the mobility of researchers across academic institutions

In a series of blog posts, we want to introduce the four principles of a new CWTS approach to research evaluation. Since 2017 we have been developing this approach in the context of several projects mainly assisting others with putting together the self-evaluation document of the Standard Evaluation Protocol.

Evaluative Inquiry II: Evaluating research in context

Bastian Drees

Grischa Fraumann

Isabella Peters

This article has been originally published at the TIB Blog.

At the TIB AV-Portal, we have created a service to watch the Altmetrics Conferences and Workshops.

You couldn't attend the Altmetrics conference? Fear not! We recorded everything you missed

Alysson Mazoni

A broad landscape of open research information systems   The landscape of open research information systems is broad. In addition to large (and global) open data sources like OpenAlex, OpenAIRE, or PubMed, we also have local or regional open data sources like SciELO, Redalyc or LaReferencia.

Towards the democratisation of open research information for scientometrics and science policy: the Campinas experience

Jeremy Y. Ng

Henry Liu

Stefanie Haustein

Over the past decade, a growing number of bibliometric analyses of varying quality have been published in the peer-reviewed literature. Despite this growth, surprisingly few published articles provide guidance on how a bibliometric analysis ought to be reported. Moreover, to our knowledge, these articles have been written based on the opinions/experiences of different researchers, as opposed to best evidence-informed practices.

The GLOBAL initiative - Contribute to improving the reporting of bibliometric analyses

Dominique Babini

Arianna Becerril Garcia

Lautaro Matas

Laura Rovelli

The Barcelona Declaration: a call for openness… but also for diversity and inclusion

The launch of the Barcelona Declaration last week aims to mobilise the global research community towards making research information open and accessible. The most common argument for openness is that research information plays a central role in the evaluation of institutions and researchers, and in the retrieval of scientific outputs.

Not only Open, but also Diverse and Inclusive: Towards Decentralised and Federated Research Information Sources

Peter van Dongen

Robert Tijssen

Excellent science

Achieving scientific success depends on several factors: inspiration, creativity, hard work, access to the most advance instruments, et cetera.

The X factor of eXcellent scientists in the Netherlands: relationships between motivation, utilisation and impact

Eleonora Dagiene

Scholarly book evaluation often prioritises ‘prestige’, which leads to inconsistent and unfair outcomes. My previous research shows that such systems consider neither the intrinsic quality of the research nor the accessibility of the work itself.

Global reach, local insights: Using book ISBNs to map publishing behaviour

Martijn Visser

The need to increase the transparency of university rankings is widely recognized, for instance in the ten rules for ranking universities that we published in 2017, in the work done by the INORMS Research Evaluation Working Group, and also in a recent report by a Dutch expert group on university rankings (co-authored by one of us). It is therefore not surprising that the announcement of the Open Edition of the CWTS Leiden Ranking in 2023 got

Opening up the CWTS Leiden Ranking: Toward a decentralized and open model for data curation

What reforms in how we assess and value research are necessary to better equip public science systems for the existential challenges of the 21st century? How can we understand and tackle issues such as inequitable access to scientific literature, increasing strain on peer review systems, and publisher oligopolies? How best to evaluate emerging knowledge infrastructures and their embedded values, e.g. of openness or sustainability?

Transforming Research Culture - Introducing the Evaluation &amp; Culture Focal Area at CWTS

Julián D. Cortés

Catalina Ramírez

Imagine national science policy as a musical chair game. The contestants are the science system actors, such as researchers, research groups, universities, companies, among others. Some actors can have more expertise dancing at the rhythm of

 salsa

than

 hip-hop,

while others might be more agile in finding a seat when the music pauses. The government plays or pauses the music, modulates its speed or changes the genre.

The changing tunes of science policy: mapping research priorities of consecutive governments

Tsuyoshi Hondou

Studies on transdisciplinary research often focus on how different forms of expertise are brought together to build robust knowledge. However, in policy and legal affairs, there are many situations in which it is not possible to use new transdisciplinary knowledge due to contextual factors, such as urgency, political expediency, or lack of resources.

Concurrent Evidence: a framework for using evidence from multiple disciplines

Mark Neijssel

Lucy Montgomery

Cameron Neylon

Bianca Kramer

Kyle Demes

Jason Priem

When the Shanghai Ranking, also known as the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), was launched in 2003, Ton van Raan, director of CWTS at the time, sounded the alarm about the problematic way in which the ranking uses bibliometric data, for instance in attributing publications to universities.

Introducing the Leiden Ranking Open Edition

Carlos Manuel Vilchez Román

Greetings from Peru, nestled in the heart of the Andes, where I find myself reflecting on two transformative events in my scientific journey: the CWTS Scientometrics Summer School (CS

 3

) and the 27th International Conference on Science, Technology, and Innovation Indicators (STI 2023). As a bibliometrics enthusiast for the past two decades, this experience has been nothing short of a revelation—a journey that prompted me to question

New Horizons: A reflection on the Scientometrics Summer School and the STI 2023 Conference

Alesia Zuccala

Lars Wenaas

Alberto Martin Martin

Open access: a change in publishing with a limited reach   Open Access is a movement and policy directive dedicated to reforming the closed or subscription-based gatekeeping of scientific research. In the subscription-based (when readers pay) model scientists communicate the results of their research, by submitting it to publishers, and in many cases to one of a small number of large commercial publishers, considered to be an oligopoly.

Has Open Access become a 'band-aid' for an historical 'innovation-gone-wrong'?

To develop our CWTS knowledge agenda we formed three focal areas at the start of this year to organise our activities. Here, we introduce the vision and roadmap of the Focal Area Engagement &amp; Inclusion. Our vision   In today's rapidly changing world, fostering a collaborative, diverse and inclusive science ecosystem that engages with society is of paramount importance.

Introducing the CWTS Focal Area Engagement and Inclusion: A vision and roadmap

Anestis Amanatidis

Research assessment practices that largely rely on publication-driven assessments of research(ers) are slowly running out of steam. A remnant of a science system that is largely inward-focused and output-oriented, these assessments paint a rather monochrome picture of science that is not fit for today’s developments that reconfigure the relationship between science and society.

Research(er) assessment that considers open science

Elizabeth Gadd

The CWTS Leiden Ranking has always been a bit different from other university rankings. It has never sought to identify an overall ‘winner’ from amongst all the universities it features, preferring instead to offer a range of indicators and rank institutions on each one separately. It also looks beyond traditional citation measures and reputation surveys to assess concepts such as open access and gender balance.

The Leiden Ranking goes beyond ranking

In a previous blog post we introduced the CWTS knowledge agenda 2023-2028. Building on this, in the current post we present the new focal areas in which CWTS organizes its activities. These focal areas address key challenges in the way science is practiced and governed, in particular challenges for which we believe our centre is uniquely positioned to make a difference and to contribute to transformative changes.

The focal areas of CWTS

Andrea Reyes Elizondo

Clara Calero-Medina

El Leiden Ranking de Universidades 2023 ha sido publicado el 21 de junio del presente año. Contiene 1411 universidades de todo el mundo, incluyendo 58 de América Latina. Al abrir la página para 2023 encontramos en un listado a la Universidad de São Paulo en la posición 12 y la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México en la 98. Pero ¿qué significan estas posiciones?

Indicadores responsables y posiciones en rankings. ¿Qué significa una posición en el Leiden Ranking? [Spanish blog post]

Dan Gibson

Henri de Winter

Alfredo Yegros

Universities in the Leiden Ranking 2023   As Figure 1 shows, the number of universities in the Leiden Ranking keeps increasing. Like in the last three editions of the ranking, a university needs to have at least 800 fractionally counted publications in the most recent four-year time window to be included in the ranking. This year 1411 universities meet this criterion, 93 more than last year and 235 more than in 2020.

The CWTS Leiden Ranking 2023

Rong Ni

Kwun Hang (Adrian) Lai

Marc Luwel

Biegzat Mulati

Jian Wang

Verena Weimer

The adoption of open science practices has become a prominent topic of study for the science studies community. However, the research practices of the community itself are still quite traditional. While open access publishing, preprinting, open peer review, open data sharing, and other open science practices are gradually becoming more common in the science studies community, the adoption of these practices is still at a relatively low level.

Experimenting with open science practices at the STI 2023 conference

Bram van den Boomen

Tony Ross-Hellauer

The scientific community is moving towards a more transparent way of conducting and reporting research. Scientific publications are becoming more and more openly accessible but openness should also extend to peer review, preprinting, preregistration, data sharing, metadata availability, and related issues.  Research funders and other stakeholders are putting a significant effort into promoting open science practices in scholarly communication.

The Journal Observatory - Connecting information on scholarly communication

Industry-University partnership is now part of the governance canon of higher education. However, the multiple forms this type of partnership can adopt are not so clear for every junior-faculty, administrators, and from there to the top-management in the higher education sector.

Industry involved in research: The case of Latin America and the Caribbean

Most researchers will only think of their Curriculum Vitae (CV) when an application deadline is nearing. Yet a recent wave of initiatives to introduce so-called narrative CV formats by research funding bodies and universities across Europe have created debate about the affordances of an otherwise taken-for-granted bureaucratic genre.

Narrative CVs: a new challenge and research agenda

Carey Ming-Li Chen

The trip to the 26th International Conference on Science, Technology and Innovation Indicators (STI 2022) in Granada, Spain, was my first international trip since I had finished my one-year research stay in Leiden and come back to Taiwan. When I learned that the STI 2022 conference would be held physically, I was very excited about returning to Europe and reconnecting with the colleagues over there.

Reconnecting in person: My account of the STI 2022 conference

The year is almost over. 2022 was not just another year for the Leiden Madtrics blog, but came with quite a variety of blog posts. We (the blog team) had a lot of fun editing all of them and are proud of our authors. They did an amazing job.   At the same time, this year diversified our social media presence: Leiden Madtrics, along with CWTS, can now be found on Mastodon as well, while the institute also launched its own Mastodon instance.

Happy Holidays!

Wenceslao Arroyo-Machado

Since its very beginnings, Wikipedia has been the target of criticism. The first (and negative) comparisons of its contents with those of other encyclopaedias are long gone, although the perception from academia was more optimistic. However, in education, the terrain in which this platform is most valuable, the controversy is greater. Its established use among students collides completely with the sceptical perception of part of the teachers.

Five key facts to consider when studying science on Wikipedia

Leonie van Drooge

Carole de Bordes

Niki Vermeulen

Mayline Strouk

Researchers collaborate across borders and continents. Students go on exchange and go study abroad. Nothing new so far. Yet formalised international strategic partnerships between universities are more recent. These agreements include both research and education and cover a range of departments. And they are expected to contribute to strategic goals and have great impact.