Guides: Research Impact: What is bibliometrics & Contact

What is bibliometrics?

Bibliometrics is the study of publications and citations between publications. It enables analysis of publication patterns and trends for journals and publications and by combining at institutional, national and for subject levels also.

It provides us with a tool to investigate the volume and citations a proxy for the impact of research, the extent of collaboration between institutions or countries and the relationship between different subject areas.

Bibliometric indicators look nice and precise, but there are a bunch of caveats associated with bibliometric indicators. This means using bibliometric indicators as assessment of research quality can be extremely flawed.

On these pages we describe the databases we use bibliometrics from, what some of the indicators are and the caveats associated with them.

We also include some guides on how to connect your various research identifiers and access bibliometric indicators for your own research profile.

Contact

CoARA

SDU signed The Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) in 2023.

It is a collective of organisations committed to reforming the methods and processes by which research, researchers, and research organisations are evaluated. Current research assessment methods rely heavily on publication-based metrics such as citation counts and often fail to recognise the wide array of contributions made by researchers.

Over 700 research organisations, funders, assessment authorities, professional societies, and their associations have agreed on a common direction and guiding principles to implement reform in the assessment of research, researchers, and research organisations, outlined in the Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment (ARRA) published in July 2022 which provides an outline for reform and implementation.

The Leiden Manifsto

The bibliometric analyses done by the SDU Library follow the principles of the Leiden Manifesto as closely as possible.

(Hicks et al. 2015. Nature 520, 429–431 doi:10.1038/520429a)