WoW! Wouter over het Web

The Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) is the home of the citation gurus in the Netherlands. They just allowed us a small peek into their kitchen. What they have studied will be used in the end to evaluate scientists, research groups, complete institutes or whole countries on the basis of quantified scientific impact. So we better watch them carefully. It is perhaps the only Dutch group that makes a substantial contribution to the Library and Information Science (LIS) arena. That is when you account the field of bibliometrics, scientometrics or webometrics to the LIS field as well. If you agree on that stance, I should mention Loet Leydesdorff as well. The other significant single contributor to the LIS field from the Netherlands. However, this is all mere guessing, gut feeling, intuition or whatever. There is no data in my possession to substantiate these claims. Perhaps an idea for another posting.

Henk F. Moed, recently published a paper on the research that is being carried out by CWTS and its staff at this moment. Three areas of research were highlighted. Ranking of world universities. Effect of bibliometric evaluations on researchers and journals and at last the influens of OA/OAI on citation impact. Reading this short article, you wish to see the full results at once. You know they have some results already in Leiden. Come on CWTS, hurry up.

In the area of university rankings it will be interesting to watch what they will have to offer on top of what is already known from the rankings by CEST, The Times Higher Education Supplement (registration required) or the Shanghai Jiao Tong University. The latter ranking has been criticized severely already by CWTS (van Raan, 2005). Despite the criticism the Jiao Tong rankings are popular. Perhaps it's simplicity is an explanation. Interesting to see that van raan is going to deliver a paper on this subject in Shanghai.

The second subject raised in the paper by Moed are the reactions of researchers and journals editors alike on the increased pressure by quantitative evaluations. Moed indicates that they identified three types of reactions by scientists based on studies of the UK Reasearch Assesment Exercises. What these reactions of authors were is not further substantiated. What a pity! A bit more insight is given for journal practices (the paper in itself, as a conference contribution published in a single journal issue is perhaps a good illustration of some of these practices). Mannino (2005) or the PLOS editorial (2006) are one of those articles that illustrate the points that Moed should make terrifically.

What interested me most, though is the Open Access part of the article (this article is currently freely accessible). Despite my previous message that OA(I) evidence for increased impact has been pilling up, Moed (2006) is less optimistic. The advantage is analyzed carefully, there is a positive early view effect, there is a positive self selection effect, but the remaining truly OA effect is negligible. Perhaps he should study Harnad’s work more carefully, since he has always proclaimed the early view effect as an important effect and as a result the speeding up of the scientific discourse. We have to await their further studies though.

Most interesting to note is that such a thin contribution to a conference results in an article in peer reviewed journal. It therefore illustrates one of those editorial policies of filling their journals when proper copy is lacking, and impact point are easily collected.

A suggestion for CWTS? Webometrics? Thellwall seems to be leading the pack in this field. CWTS should follow this direction as well.

Literature
Mannino, D.M. (2005). Impact Factor, Impact, and smoke and mirrors. American Journal of Respiratory and critical care medicine 171(4): 417-418.
Moed, H.F. (2006). New developments in citation analysis and research evaluation. Information Services and Use 26(2): 135-137. http://iospress.metapress.com/openurl.asp?genre=article&issn=0167-5265&volume=26&issue=2&spage=135.
The PLoS Medicine Editors (2006). The Impact Factor Game. PLoS Medicine 3(6): e291. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.0030291 .
van Raan, A.F.J. (2005). Fatal attraction: Conceptual and methodological problems in the ranking of universities by bibliometric methods. Scientometrics 62(1): 133-143. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11192-005-0008-6.

Technorati tags: bibliometrics; CWTS; LIS; OA; OAI