R. E. De Bruin’s research while affiliated with Leiden University and other places

Addresses in scientific publications contain a large number of variations. This phenomenon has serious consequences for the availability of information and for evaluative bibliometrics. Organizations are difficult to identify and become "scattered' in rankings. To solve this problem, we developed a strategy of unification, i.e. classification of all variations by one name. To begin with, we sorted on the first part of the address. Next, we unified these addresses by the name of an overall organization (such as a university). We did so by analyzing the publication data. For some countries we performed further research in handbooks and encyclopedias. We solved the problem of scattering of organizations over several suburbs by bringing these city names under the denominator of the conurbation like Paris, London, etc. We unified variations i n country names by the official name or its abbreviation.

During the past few years, bibliometric studies were conducted on research performance at three Flemish universities: The University of Ghent, the Catholic University of Leuven, and the University of Antwerp. Longitudinal analyses of research input, publication output, and impact covering a time span of 12 years were made of hundreds of research departments. This article outlines the general methodology used during these studies, and presents the main outcomes with respect to the faculties of medicine, science, and pharmaceutical science at the three universities involved. It focuses on the reactions of the researchers working in these faculties and of the university evaluation authorities on the studies.

This paper gives an outline of a new bibliometric database based upon all articles published by authors from the Netherlands, and processed during the time period 1980–1993 by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) for theScience Citation Index (SCI),Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) andArts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI). The paper describes various types of information added to the database: data on articles citing the Dutch publications; detailed citation data on ISI journals and subfields; and a classification system of publishing main organizations, appearing in the addresses. Moreover, an overview is given of the types of bibliometric indicators that were constructed. Their relationship to indicators developed by other researchers in the field is discussed. Finally, two applications are given in order to illustrate the potentials of the database and of the bibliometric indicators derived from it. The first represents a synthesis of classical macro indicator studies at the one hand, and bibliometric analyses of research groups or institutes at the other. The second application gives for the first time a detailed analysis of a country's publication output per institutional sector.

Until recently, little attention was paid in Belgium to the efficiency of the research system. The University of Ghent was the first Belgian university to decide to perform a systematic evaluation of its research performance using bibliometric indicators derived from the Science. Citation Index. The results were compared to the world average and to the average impact of the set of journals, in which the Ghent scientists published. Subsequently, these results were discussed with scientists of several evaluated departments to obtain tentative explanations for the bibliometric patterns. The university policy makers can use these results for research planning and the scientists for improving their publication strategy.

An appropriate delimitation of scientific subfields constitutes one of the key problems in bibliometrics. Several methods have been explored for this task. The main ones are co-citation analysis, co-word analysis, the use of indexing systems based on controlled or uncontrolled keywords, and finally the use of a classification of scientific journals into subfields or categories. In our contribution we will explore a new method, which is based on cognitive words from addresses (corporate sources) in scientific publications. Cognitive address words are words referring to scientific (sub)fields, methods or objects of research, that appear in the institutional affiliations of the publishing authors (e.g., Department of Pharmacology, AIDS Research Center). We will focus on theScience Citation Index (SCI), published by the Institute for Scientific Information. Our methods will be applied to a multidisciplinary set of articles extracted from the journalsScience andNature.

International scientific co-operation (ISC) and awareness are topics of increasing interest for both scientists and science policy makers. In this paper, we adopt primarily the science policy point of view. After a concise overview of the literature we summarize the main results of the research we conducted. The main outcome with respect to ISC is that it increases. However, large differences exist between countries and between scientific disciplines. ISC and awareness constitute a complex phenomenon, affected by several factors, science-internal, as well as external. In the paper several techniques are described, amongst which those that can visualize ISC relations through analytical maps. An important aspect of our research methodology is the combination of various quantitative, bibliometric analyses and qualitative research on the structure of science and the relations between science and society. Finally, we sketch perspectives for future research.

An evaluation was made of the use of bibliometric indicators for five disciplines in the humanities (social history, general linguistics, general literature, Dutch literature, and Dutch language) and three disciplines in the social and behavioural sciences (experimental psychology, anthropology, and public administration) in the Netherlands. Articles in journals were the predominant outlet in all disciplines. Monographs and popularizing articles were more important outlets in softer fields than in harder ones. The enlightenment function of scholarship was especially evident in Dutch literature and language, and public administration. Only some of the humanities disciplines are locally oriented. Although many publications were written in English, only experimental psychology, general linguistics, anthropology, and genrral literature were internationally oriented regarding output media. The impact of departments differed greatly both within and between disciplines. For all disciplines, bibliometric indicators are potentially useful for monitoring international impact, as expert interviews confirmed. Especially in Dutch language, Dutch literature and public administration, ISI-citation data are not very useful for monitoring national impact.