Ludo Waltman

Peer review: Time well spent?
 

Peer review is a time-consuming activity. In 2020 I received 73 invitations to review a new article submitted to a scientific journal. On average, reviewing an article, both the original version and possibly also subsequent revised versions, probably takes me about seven hours in total.

Making my peer review activity more useful

Wenceslao Arroyo-Machado

Leiden University

Rodrigo Costas

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

Ingeborg Meijer

Sonia Mena Jara

Anestis Amanatidis

Tim Willemse

Gaston Heimeriks

Looking back
 

At the STI conference 2018 in Leiden, two strands of work at CWTS, the Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) work in the MoRRi project, and the regional knowledge patterns for innovation, got together.

CHERRIES and RIPEET: CWTS traveling the Science - Society interface

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

Josephine Bergmans

Institute projects at CWTS are projects that are acquired through different funding sources, such as Horizon2020, tenders set out by the European Commission, but also national funding, such as NWO in the Netherlands. Usually, we work on the institute projects within a consortium of multiple organisations, such as universities, public institutions, or sometimes companies.

A glimpse into the projects at CWTS

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

Zeynep Anli

Clara Calero-Medina

Mark Neijssel

Andrea Reyes Elizondo

Nees Jan van Eck

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

Márcia R. Ferreira

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

Ismael Rafols

“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

Vít Macháček

Nicolás Robinson-García

Martin Srholec

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

Jonathan Dudek

Zhichao Fang

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers from all over the world and from multidisciplinary backgrounds are working on answers to the challenges raised by the disease. In this regard, the biomedical point of view is also accompanied by broader social, economic and political perspectives.

Monitoring the dissemination of COVID-19-related scientific publications in online media

Twenty years ago, Fiona Godlee, at that time Editorial Director for Medicine at open access publisher BioMed Central, wrote a sharp critique of the traditional system of closed pre-publication peer review, arguing that the system needs to be opened and drawing attention to the opportunities offered by “preprint servers combined with open commentary” to realize this openness.

The growth of open peer review

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

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

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

Aaron Tay

Bianca Kramer

This post was originally published at Medium.

The value of open and interoperable metadata of scientific articles is increasingly being recognized, as demonstrated by the work of organizations such as Crossref, DataCite, and OpenCitations and by initiatives such as Metadata 2020 and the Initiative for Open Citations.

Why openly available abstracts are important — overview of the current state of affairs

Tobias Nosten

Jeroen van Honk

Funding data (and the funding database)

Funding acknowledgements are a familiar component of scholarly publications. In most cases, authors use this segment of the publication to list any grants, programs or other forms of financial support that made the research possible. In some cases, authors also use this space to express gratitude for any personal support they have received.

To Count or not to Count: How to Deal with Funding Acknowledgements

François van Schalkwyk

Daniel Torres-Salinas

Tina Nane

One of the many puzzles of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the extent to which children are vulnerable to and spreaders of the virus. Fewer infection rates have been reported in children compared with adults, as have milder symptoms. But the infection rate in children is biased, given the testing policies in many countries.

Attention for science in step with policy? The case of school closures during 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

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

The shift in R&amp;D goals towards the SDGs is driving demand for new S&amp;T indicators…

The shift in Science &amp; Technology policy from a focus on research quality (or ‘excellence’) towards societal impact has led to a demand for new Science &amp; Technology indicators that capture the contributions of research to society, in particular those aligned with SDGs.

Consensus and dissensus in ‘mappings’ of science for Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

Sarah Rose Bieszczad

Jochem Zuijderwijk

Months into the corona crisis we are living in a world changed, for better or worse things are

 other

than they once were. It is obvious many countries were underprepared, but does it make sense to ask—could this have been otherwise? Indeed, this is a prodigious question, one unlikely to be answered comprehensively by a blog post.

Could pre-Covid-19 research into coronaviruses have been otherwise? Episode one: Careers

As my latest research reveals, the prestige of a book publisher yields points for getting government funding, not only in my home country Lithuania, but also in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and other countries.

Do not assess books by their publishers

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

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

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 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

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

Carole de Bordes

This blogpost is a follow-up of the post by Ed Noyons Going back to normal?, published almost a year ago. Back then, he discussed the impact of COVID-19 on work conditions and proposed the idea of rethinking all the commuting we were doing in ‘normal' times.

Utrecht lunch walks: an initiative to cope with remote working

Any conversation about research evaluation in the Netherlands has the risk of developing along this line. The Dutch way of evaluating academic research might not be unique, but it is certainly not common, nor fully understood. As a member of the working group for the monitoring and further development of the evaluation protocol – and as an employee of CWTS – let me provide insight and context.

Research evaluation in context 1: Introducing research evaluation in the Netherlands

Jackie Ashkin

Online or offline?

Where to begin? In the spring of this year – right as Europe’s “first wave” hit – we started thinking about how to organise our second-ever research retreat. We considered several options.

How can we organise team building and brainstorming online in times of corona?

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.

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

Diego Chavarro

Open Access (OA) is key to achieve a greater dissemination of knowledge among scholars. Its benefits are acknowledged and advocated by many researchers, universities, and funding agencies internationally. They have produced global manifestos and implemented collective actions to make publicly-funded research open.

Beyond Open Access articles:  briefs can provide wider and faster access to scientific knowledge

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

Blog team

This is our last blog post of the year. 2019 has been a very fruitful year for us, and we are looking forward to what 2020 will bring. For now, we would like to wish you a Merry Christmas and a new year full of scientific discoveries.

Happy holidays!

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

Why is it important that Elsevier is going to open its citations?

Both DORA and the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) have called on publishers to make the reference lists of their articles openly available. In response to this, almost all large and medium-sized publishers have made their citations openly available in Crossref. Elsevier was one of the very few major publishers that have not yet opened their citations.

Q&amp;A about Elsevier's decision to open its citations

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

“What do you do for work?” is a common conversation starter at social gatherings. For doctors or teachers, this is easier to answer, but for members of the A-TEAM this is a question that requires a lengthy explanation. The short answer would be that we unify organizations in a database, but this does not cover all our work.

A-TEAM: A stands for a very challenging job

Previous posts on the Strategy Evaluation Protocol 2021-2027 describe the criteria and aspects and the process and responsibilities. Asking to judge research units on their own merits and putting the responsibility for the evaluation with the research organisations proves quite a challenge. Evaluation might not always happen according to protocol, yet the process itself offers opportunities to reflect and define. And as such it has value.

Research evaluation in context 4: the practice of research evaluation

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

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;

What Affects Research Productivity: View from Inside the University

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

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

Evaluative Inquiry IV: Accountability and learning

Peter Sjögårde

I recently visited CWTS to discuss and present my PhD project, which is about the algorithmic classification of research publications. My previous experiences when working with this topic and the discussions during my week at CWTS led me to further consider the question about what holds a research field together.

The challenge of categorizing research

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?

At CWTS, many researchers travel around the world to attend conferences, meet with relevant stakeholders, give lectures and/or provide trainings. But what are the costs of all these travels? There are many reasons to avoid flying and to facilitate virtual conferencing, including climate change, work pressure, and seeking to include a diverse audience.

Pre-COVID-19 workshop on virtual meetings and conferences

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

Madhan Muthu

Josep-Manuel Rodríguez-Gairín

Marta Somoza-Fernández

Cristóbal Urbano

How agriculture benefits from research through extension and engagement

Different sectors benefit from science in different ways. In the case of agriculture, innovations based on science often originate from providers of farmers, for example in the form of seeds or machinery. However, the diffusion or uptake of innovations is difficult, in particular for small farmers.

Why coverage matters: Invisibility of agricultural research from the Global South may be an obstacle to development

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.

Leiden Madtrics

Welcome to 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?