Methods &amp; Skills

Methods & Skills

Bibliometric Analysis

The Centre for Social Innovation conducts bibliometric analyses of international academic co-publications. This work relates to and builds upon ZSI’s research activities in the area of the internationalisation of science, technology, and innovation.

The analysis of scientists’ and scientific institutions’ bilateral and multilateral cooperation patterns considers the following dimensions:

Number of international co-publications of two or more authors based in two or more countries/regions
Time series displaying the development of the number of international co-publications
Comparison with general publication output
Core and emerging thematic areas in the respective cooperation
Impact analyses (subject area and institution specific as well as over time) based on field-normalised citation counts
Institutional cooperation patterns and their development over time
State-of-the-art bibliometric indicators for research output and collaboration (Jaccard and Salton's measures, Crown indicator, etc.)

In addition to high-quality data processing and analysis, we particularly focus on user-centred and interactive data visualisation. This renders the amounts of data intelligible and allows users to experience and experiment with results almost playfully. Concretely, we work with innovative chart formats (like heat maps, word clouds, etc.), mostly created in the open source statistical software package 'R' as well as with tools for interactive visual analysis of geographical and network data (see, for instance, jflowmap developed by Ilya Boyandin: http://code.google.com/p/jflowmap/ or Data Driven Documents (d3js.org)).

In addition to visualisation techniques, it is an increased analytical depth that defines our unique selling points: In addition to using state-of-the-art science metrics, we have developed algorithms allowing us to analyse combined, unified data from both major contemporary academic literature databases, namely Scopus and Web of Science. Algorithms, combined with manual correction, allow for significant improvement of raw data, journal and record matching as well as institution clustering.

Together with ZSI’s social scientific and evaluation expertise, quantitative analyses of co-publications can readily be expanded towards programme evaluations or the development of indicators and benchmarks for international cooperation, as well as towards broader social scientific research projects.

References/ Contracting Authorities:

Research Council of Norway
Bundesministerium für Wissenschaft, Forschung und Wirtschaft
European Commission (Framework Programme 7 and Horizon 2020)

Contact person: DI Dietmar Lampert

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