Halloween 2019. A team of seven at CWTS is hectically working on the launch of the institute’s new science blog. Getting the last settings in WordPress right, preparing a quick announcement, entering the first posts (so that things don’t look too empty) – we (the editorial team) were rather excited.

53 blog posts later, it is time to reflect a bit. Admittedly, we started out rather open-mindedly. There wasn’t much that we could have foreseen back then. Beginning with the quirky name, we wanted this blog to be a playful and accessible way of communicating the research done at CWTS. All of that while maintaining a rather broad range of topics. Anything related to Science of Science, Scientometrics, Evaluation Studies - you name it.

Admittedly, our initial goals felt quite ambitious, even given our enthusiasm. But – editing a blog is a task one grows with over time. And it’s not about doing it perfectly, either. What counts is just to slowly gain experience and routine and also, to have a team to share the burden with. And not to forget our authors who provided all the posts! In the end, it is thanks to them that editing a science blog is fun (most of the time).

We hope that you, our readers, could also gain a bit from following the blog. Maybe you have found your very own reason to stop by and look around? Be it finding out more about meta-science, learning about new topics, or just killing some time – we are sure that there have been posts for which it was worth it. Let’s go on a quick tour and delve into some of our highlights from the past year!

To begin with, Covid-19 not only had an impact on everyone’s life but got its fair share on the blog as well. Twelve entire blog posts were dedicated or related to this topic (and maybe there are yet more to come?). Actually, we liked most of them quite a bit. Here, we would just like to highlight the three posts that reflected on the social implications of the lockdown, written by our authors Carey, Eleonora, and Ed.

Observant readers of Leiden Madtrics might have noticed that delineations of science of all sorts have been a recurrent theme. These posts have hopefully contributed to a better understanding of e.g., how science can be mapped according to the SDGs, why it is so difficult to categorize research, or which the most prominent topics in, well, Covid-19 related research are.

Open Science enjoys some prominence on the blog as well. Be it on the topic of open abstracts, current developments concerning open access, or the application of the FAIR-principles to scientific publications, this topic is hard to miss.

Sometimes, our authors contribute a full-blown study as a blog post. That is, of course, great, but can give the editors some headache when it involves implementing fancy Tableau visualizations… But in the end, we can learn from that as well.

One might ask: where actually do the ‘metrics’ as in ‘Madtrics’ come in? A pertinent example are the indicators in the Leiden Ranking 2020. Or consider the series on the Evaluative Inquiry and research metrics, covering the role of value, the context of research, and the use of mixed methods in evaluation practices.

Finally, there is one blog post that we are particularly fond of. It’s a rather light-hearted, yet so informative approach to describing some of the work done at CWTS. Read again about the daily quest of the A-team!

This is of course just a selection. Explore further for yourself, browse through the different categories, or maybe use the tags to find out more about a topic. Also, if you haven’t subscribed to the email notifications or followed us on Twitter yet, this could be a good moment. Thank you so much for following until here, and hopefully, stay around for the year that lies ahead!