The next international 5-day CWTS Course ‘Measuring Science and Research Performance’ will be held in Leiden, The Netherlands, from September 24-28 2012.

The aim of the course is to provide a serious grounding in the role of quantitative analyses in research evaluation. The course will consider relevant aspects of the larger context of research evaluation, including existing and new knowledge communication patterns, science policy issues, the role of funding, and new trends in research evaluation. The core of the course is devoted to bibliometric analysis approaches – their rationales, methodology and limitations. In addition to lectures, the program offers interactive modules on science mapping, network analysis, and the construction and interpretation of performance evaluation studies. Attention will also be paid to the recent rise of research evaluation in general, and the increasing emphasis on quantitative measures in particular.

The course is intended for professionals whose work is closely related to research evaluation: Government and research organization officials, research institution staff, industrial R&D managers, and scientist, scholars and engineers involved in science policy, research management, and research evaluation procedures. The course will be taught by lecturers from the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS), Leiden University.

To keep the quality high, we have set the maximum amount of participants at 20.
More information, including the registration form, can be found at http://www.cwts.nl/

Abstract
The causes of gender bias favoring men in scientific and scholarly systems are complex and related to overall gender relationships in most of the countries of the world. An as yet unanswered question is whether in research publication gender bias is equally distributed over scientific disciplines and fields or if that bias reflects a closer relation to the subject matter. We expected less gender bias with respect to subject matter, and so analysed 14 journals of gender studies using several methods and indicators. The results confirm our expectation: the very high position of women in co-operation is striking; female scientists are relatively overrepresented as first authors in articles. Collaboration behaviour in gender studies differs from that of authors in PNAS. The pattern of gender studies reflects associations between authors of different productivity, or “masters” and “apprentices” but the PNAS pattern reflects associations between authors of roughly the same productivity, or “peers”. It would be interesting to extend the analysis of these three-dimensional collaboration patterns further, to see whether a similar characterization holds, what it might imply about the patterns of authorship in different areas, what those patterns might imply about the role of collaboration, and whether there are differences between females and males in collaboration patterns.

In March, Mike Thelwall gave a keynote lecture at the Oxford Internet Institute’s Symposium “Social Science and Digital Research: Interdisciplinary Insights“, held in Oxford on 12 March 2012. The keynote, Webometrics: The Evolution of a Digital Social Science Research Field, is now available on video.

Abstract:
The research field of webometrics encompasses various forms of web-based link and text analyses. Webometric studies have included large scale analyses of social network sites and social web sites like Flickr, Twitter and YouTube, as well as areas of the traditional web, such as university websites. Webometrics began in 1997 within the discipline of Library and Information Science (LIS) in response to the recognition that commercial search engines could turn the Web into a large database for certain types of LIS research. In response to technical challenges involving automatically gathering web data, webometrics attracted people with computing backgrounds and became an interdisciplinary field in approximately 2000. Webometrics further evolved in 2003, when it began to incorporate social science research goals outside of LIS. The evolution was cemented in 2008 with the development of information-centred research theory: defining a type of research that had the goal of discovering suitable social science applications for new types of web information (Thelwall, Wouters and Fry, 2008). Since then webometrics has consciously attempted to develop quantitative web research methods and theories to have general application within social science, although continuing to prioritise LIS goals and approaches. This talk evaluates the impact and progress of webometrics: its impact within LIS and the wider social sciences. Although webometrics has been repeatedly singled out for its achievements within LIS, outside of LIS it has been much less successful. The evaluation will centre on evidence for the uptake of the methods generated by practicing webometricians and reasons behind their successes and failures.

References:
Thelwall, M., Wouters, P., and Fry, J. (2008) Information-Centred Research for large-scale analysis of new information sources, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 59 (9) 1523-1527.

The workshop, Career Development in Academia, is being held this week in St. Petersburg, Russia. Proceedings will begin with a keynote address by Paul Wouters, ACUMEN Principle Investigator. In his talk, Wouters will introduce ACUMEN’s conceptual approach and provide impressions from progress in the collaborative research program, now in its 16th month. The workshop addresses contemporary theory and current research on academic careers, and is organized in six sessions over two days. Session topics:

          05 July -
1. Academic careers – theoretical and comparative perspectives
2. Science system as the organizational framework of career development
3. Academic career development in changing social context

          06 July -
4. Scientific beginners – early academic careers
5. Career development and national context
6. Gender differences in academic career development

The Career Development in Academia workshop is sponsored by the European Sociological Association (ESA), the Sociology of Science and Technology Network (SSTNET) and the Centre for Sociology of Science and Science Studies, Institute for the History of Science and Technology (IHST) of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The full workshop program is available here (pdf) and collection of abstracts here (zip).

Abstract: The research blog has become a popular mechanism for the quick discussion of scholarly information. However, unlike peer-reviewed journals, the characteristics of this form of scientific discourse are not well understood, for example in terms of the spread of blogger levels of education, gender and institutional affiliations. In this paper we fill this gap by analyzing a sample of blog posts discussing science via an aggregator called ResearchBlogging.org (RB). ResearchBlogging.org aggregates posts based on peer-reviewed research and allows bloggers to cite their sources in a scholarly manner. We studied the bloggers, blog posts and referenced journals of bloggers who posted at least 20 items. We found that RB bloggers show a preference for papers from high-impact journals and blog mostly about research in the life and behavioral sciences. The most frequently referenced journal sources in the sample were: Science, Nature, PNAS and PLoS One. Most of the bloggers in our sample had active Twitter accounts connected with their blogs, and at least 90% of these accounts connect to at least one other RB-related Twitter account. The average RB blogger in our sample is male, either a graduate student or has been awarded a PhD and blogs under his own name.

Bradley Voytek, a neuroscientist at UC Berkeley, conducted an experiment and concludes the following:

Well, it seems like having a social media presence is probably a reflection of the journal’s popularity in general, but that, on average, the journals that do the most social media engagement (amongst the top-tier journals!) show the lowest impact factors.

See here for the blog post about his experiment.

An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, 16 August 2011
by Ellen Hazelkorn, author of Rankings and the Reshaping of Higher Education: The Battle for World-Class Excellence

Hazelkorn poses this question:

While academe has questioned the trend away from curiosity driven and towards application-focused research, there is a responsibility on publicly-financed research(ers). Yet, this is not what ranking journals measures. In other words, using policy’s own objectives, ranking journals simply measures what one academic has written and the other has read rather than its impact and benefit on/for society. Where is the evidence the research is helping resolve society’s major challenges or benefit students?

Full text of the article is here.

Last week Birger Larsen’ MSc student, Danielle Chiosso Liu, defended her thesis entitled ‘A Portfolio of indicators: Broadening the scope of bibliometric research evaluation of the humanities – a mixed methods exploration.’ The thesis work was begun last year and inspired by the initial ACUMEN project proposal.

Abstract
Funding allocation schemes are increasingly incorporating bibliometric indicators into evaluation of research. Evaluative bibliometrics have proven to be especially problematic when applied to the humanities. The paper sets out to determine whether or not a portfolio of indicators can better represent humanities scholarship quantitatively, compared to the standard productivity/citation analyses often used in research evaluation practices. A literature survey, qualitative interviews, and bibliometric methods are combined in a mixed methods approach. The proposed portfolio extends source data and includes unconventional indicators of more informal aspects of scholarly communication. The indicators are tested on a small sample, taking demographic variables into consideration. This study finds that while a portfolio of indicators has potential, it is still a ways away from being viable in an evaluative capacity. Technical and theoretical developments are needed. Interview results show an overall ambivalence towards evaluative bibliometrics in research evaluation; scholars are wary of normalizing effects any quantitative analysis might have when applied to evaluation. A pragmatic mixed methods approach like the one used in this paper is recommended for future studies in issues of research evaluation, making sure to take into account the individual perspective of humanities scholars.

Birger uploaded the full text to SURFgroepen, here.

Paul Wouters and Clifford Tatum attended an interesting workshop wednesday, 04 May, on Coordinating Open Access in European science policy. The program included presentations on a number of innovative projects, experiments, and studies from around Europe (see program here)

We presented our ACUMEN project there, making the connection with the current Open Access debates. Here is the full presentation.