Publications

Since the 2000s, the digitization of bibliometric infrastructure has accelerated at a rapid pace. In this article, we analyse how these developments in evaluative bibliometrics have contributed to an extension of indicator-based research evaluation towards data-driven research analytics. Drawing on empirical material from blogs and websites as well as from research and policy papers, we discuss how interoperability, scalability, and flexibility as material specificities of digital infrastructures generate new ways of data production and their assessment, which affect the possibilities of how academic performance can be understood and (e)valuated.

The survey of scientific and administrative employees at medical faculties in Germany is part of module 7 „Praktikabilität, Akzeptanz und Verhaltenswirksamkeit“ in the collaborative project „Qualitätsmaße zur Evaluierung medizinischer Forschung“ (QuaMedFo). It was planned and conducted in close cooperation of the German Center for Higher Education Research and Science Studies (DZHW) and the Universitätsmedizin Göttingen (UMG) in the first half of 2021. Data preparation was completed in the second half of 2021. https://doi.org/10.21249/DZHW:qmf2021:1.0.0

This paper discusses drawbacks of the percentile rank method for citation impact normalization which have hitherto been neglected in the bibliometrics literature. The transformation of citation counts to percentile ranks changes ratio scale data into ordinal scale data, for which the notions of the ratio between two values and of the magnitude of a difference between two values are not defined – a substantial loss of information. This distorts citation data particularly severely because the differences between citation counts adjacent in order in publication sets are greater for more highly cited publications and because highly cited publications are more scarce than non-highly cited ones. [...]