Leiden University

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

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

Tjitske Holtrop

Laurens Hessels

Ad Prins

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

Blog team

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!

Bram van den Boomen

Nees Jan van Eck

Tony Ross-Hellauer

Serge Horbach

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

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

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

Eleonora Dagiene

Qianqian Xie

The course “Visualising Science Using VOSviewer”   VOSviewer was developed to construct various networks based on scientific literature. One type of maps is co-occurrence networks of essential terms. They provide an overview of the topics in the publications. Other networks are bibliometric; they are based on co-authorship or citations.

Visualising quantitative data with VOSviewer will widen your research projects

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

Zeynep Anli

Clara Calero-Medina

Mark Neijssel

Andrea Reyes Elizondo

Martijn Visser

Today CWTS is releasing the 2020 edition of the CWTS Leiden Ranking. As always, the release of the ranking requires a major effort involving contributions from a large number of colleagues at our center. This year, the COVID-19 crisis, combined with a major update of the internal data infrastructure at CWTS, created additional challenges, which has unfortunately led to a delay of almost two months in the release of the ranking.

The CWTS Leiden Ranking 2020

For years I had been moving towards a long-cherished dream: pursuing a PhD. In my academic publishing role, the Leiden Manifesto, Leiden Ranking, and CWTS journal indicators had played an important part. The Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS), seemed the most suitable place. However, I was wondering if this would be possible for a middle-aged mother of four living in a small Eastern European country.

The bright side of the lockdown: the experience of conducting PhD studies remotely

Bijan Ranjbar-Sahraei

There are many reasons why we should be concerned with how science is portrayed in the news media, particularly given the ‘infodemic’ related to COVID-19. For example, over-hyped research results can lead to misinterpretation that may contribute, among other things, to public skepticism and distrust towards science.

COVID-19 research in the news: Visualizing the sentiment and topics in science news about the pandemic

Rinze Benedictus

Ingeborg Meijer

“Fund and forget”, that is how Jordi Molas-Gallart from the research centre Ingenio (CSIC-UPV) in València teasingly characterized the way large national research funders often operate. It’s also a point of departure for thinking about new ways of research evaluation. The cornerstones of many forms of research evaluation are peer review and bibliometric analysis.

From ‘fund and forget’ to formative and participatory research evaluation

Sarah de Rijcke

At CWTS, we have substantial expertise in research evaluation, including academic careers, institutional evaluation, journal evaluation, university rankings, responsibility and engagement, and open science. We regularly reach out to share our knowledge and foster good practice. But do we also ‘practice what we preach’? Are we doing enough to foster an appreciative working culture, to harbour a safe space, and to promote open dialogues?

Responsible Research Culture: Practicing what we preach at CWTS

Thed van Leeuwen

Sometimes, bringing home a message requires a more visual approach. That’s why recently, we teamed up with a graphic designer to create an infographic on the

 h

-index – or rather, on the reasons why not to use the

 h

-index.

Halt the h-index

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

André Brasil

Walking through the halls of Sorbonne University last month, I find an announcement on a wall that would catch the eye of anyone interested in Open Science (OS): it was the Sorbonne Declaration on Research Data Rights. Signed at this very university a few weeks ago, the Declaration was published on January 28 at the LERU website, and it is an important document to promote Open Data. But what exactly is Open Data?

Sorbonne declaration on research data rights

Leonie van Drooge

DARPA is one of many examples of how the entrepreneurial state makes high-risk investments and creates markets. DARPA is often referred to when it comes to funding for missions. It is unique and differs in many ways from traditional research agencies. This blog post illuminates some of its particularities; some inspiring, others just interesting, and again others not so pretty.

Vaccine development in context

The learnings have been presented and published in different shapes and forms, book chapters, working papers, reports, many deliverables, publications, and presentations. Here we present the breadth and depth of the work by linking it to the SUPER MoRRI blogpost series and turning them into an overarching story in two episodes.

A monitoring and evaluation framework for responsibility in R&amp;I

Bianca Kramer

Why is it important that abstracts are made openly available? In a blog post that we published two years ago together with our colleague Aaron Tay, we discussed numerous ways in which open abstracts can be of great value. This includes scientific literature search, both using traditional query-based search tools and using more advanced text mining and visualization tools.

Q&amp;A about Wiley's decision to open its abstracts

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

Ana Parrón Cabañero

Open Science at CWTS in retrospect

Leiden University sees Open Science (OS) as a key element on the path towards making greater scientific and societal impact and fostering research quality and integrity.

Walking the talk: a peek into Open Science practices at CWTS

Lidia Carballo-Costa

The Gender Inequalities in Science workshop took place at Leiden University on 7th-8th October 2019, organized jointly by CWTS and Elsevier’s International Center for the Study of Research (ICSR). For two days, researchers from different research institutions, universities and science stakeholders discussed issues concerning gender in science from diverse perspectives and contexts.

Gender inequalities in science: Evidence and ideas from bibliometrics

Alfredo Yegros

How does the research profile of pharma companies look like? What diseases are these companies investigating? What are their main research partners? Where are their laboratories and collaborators located? These are relevant questions for those interested on R&amp;D dynamics in the pharmaceutical sector. However, this type of information is often not publicly available and, when it is available, it is often fragmented.

New interactive website to visualize Big Pharma’s publication landscape

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

Yesterday it was announced that the Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU), the Netherlands Federation of University Medical Centres (NFU), the Dutch Research Council (NWO) and Elsevier have reached a national deal that includes Open Access publishing and reading services. The deal had been long in the making, and the road was bumpy.

Elsevier and the Dutch Open Science goals

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

Dmitry Kochetkov

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

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

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

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

Maria Amuchastegui

Wolfgang Kaltenbrunner

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?

*This is the last blog post on the Evaluative Inquiry, the new approach to research evaluation that CWTS has been developing since 2017, following one on

 broadening the concept of academic value

,**evaluating research in context *

 and
 
 mixing methods
 
 .

In evaluations of any kind people often distinguish between summative and formative evaluations (see for example the classic Evaluator’s Handbook from

Evaluative Inquiry IV: Accountability and learning

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‘

Alex Rushforth

In June 2022, the Council of the European Union gave the green light for a European Agreement on research assessment reforms to go ahead. Plans for this initiative were proposed in a European Commission scoping report in 2021.

What lies ahead for research assessment reforms in Europe?

The 28th International Conference on Science, Technology and Innovation Indicators (STI) 2024 is just around the corner, set to take place in Berlin on 18-20 September!

CWTS ventures Into the Great Wide Open

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

The release of the first Open Edition of the CWTS Leiden Ranking in January this year triggered an overwhelming response. It was covered by various news media, including Research Professional, AEF info, and TheMetaNews, and was endorsed by important stakeholders such as the International Science Council, the French Committee for Open Science, and the National Agency for Research and Development in Chile.

Launch of the CWTS Leiden Ranking Open Edition 2024

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

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

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

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

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

Margaret Gold

Throughout a recent series of blog posts, we have been introducing the CWTS knowledge agenda for 2023-2028, which is divided into three new focal areas to organise our activities on specific themes.

Citizen Science in the CWTS Knowledge Agenda

Vincent Traag

Judit Varga

Carole de Bordes

Tim Willemse

The past years have shown that science can play an important role in societal debates. Science was clearly pivotal in the development of COVID-19 vaccines. In addition, many of the interventions and policies, such as masking, school closures or even curfews, were presented as evidence-based solutions, motivated by scientific advances in our understanding of the virus.

Understanding Misinformation and Science in Societal Debates

A value-led perspective on Open Science

In 2021, UNESCO approved its Recommendation on Open Science (OS). By signing this recommendation, 193 countries made a commitment to support the development of OS with a vision of science as a global public good.

The UNESCO Open Science Outlook: OS progresses, but unequally

Lucy Montgomery

Cameron Neylon

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

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

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

Biegzat Mulati

Rong Ni

Jian Wang

Kwun Hang (Adrian) Lai

Marc Luwel

Ed Noyons

Verena Weimer

Open science was one of the key topics at the Science, Technology and Innovation Indicators (STI) conference that CWTS organised in September 2023 in Leiden, the Netherlands. Open science was not only discussed at the conference but was also put into practice in the publication and peer review process of the conference. By way of experiment, all papers submitted to the conference were published as a preprint before they were peer reviewed.

Preprinting and open peer review at the STI 2023 conference: Evaluation of an open science experiment

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

Leiden Madtrics

Reflections on the Impact of Science Conference 2019

The Pain of Labeling Things

Mapping science using Microsoft Academic data

Why are global health needs unmet by research efforts?