Bibliometric Analysis at Wageningen University & Research – comparison of three bibliometric systems

The library of Wageningen University & Research (WUR) delivers bibliometric analysis for various evaluations throughout the institution. The current self-developed system is based on Web of Science and Essential Science Indicators Baselines [1]. During the last national evaluation critical comments on the current system have been made and lead to a project in which the WUR-system was compared to two commercial systems, namely InCites and SciVal. In the project we studied what the effect will be on the bibliometric indicators when shifting to one of the commercial systems.

In the project we analysed the publications of 14 chair groups and the research institutes – currently the main level for evaluation – with the three available systems. The WUR-system provides a Mean Normalised Citations Score and the share of top 10% and top 1% most cited publications.

Groups from the social sciences and groups in applied sciences (institutes) profit from a change from Web of Science as a citation database to Scopus resulting in better coverage of the scientific articles. For some groups Staff Publications results in higher Mean Normalized Citation Scores and for the other groups SciVal results in higher scores. Again groups from the social sciences and groups in applied sciences benefit from a change in system from Staff Publications to SciVal. Groups in more fundamental sciences score lower in systems with more differentiated categories like SciVal and InCites. This can be explained by the distribution of the publications over more and smaller categories with higher citation baselines compared to ESI-baselines.

[1] Van Veller, M.G.P., W. Gerritsma, P.L. van der Togt, C.D. Leon & C.M. van Zeist (2010). Bibliometric analyses on repository contents for the evaluation of research at Wageningen UR. In: A. Katsirikou and C.H. Skiadas eds. Qualitative and Quantitative Methods in Libraries: Theory and Applications. p.19-26. http://edepot.wur.nl/7266.