Leiden Madtrics readers might already be familiar with what some have called a “great project” but a “terrible acronym”: GLOBAL, the Guidance List for the repOrting of Bibliometric AnaLyses.

Last summer, we invited bibliometricians to join the GLOBAL Delphi study to co-develop a reporting guideline for bibliometric analyses. Since then, our international team has completed a scoping review, and conducted two Delphi rounds, including an in-person consensus meeting in Berlin following the 2024 Science, Technology and Innovation Indicators (STI) conference.

We’re in the final stretch of developing the GLOBAL reporting guideline and are seeking your input to help improve it! We are currently recruiting pilot testers to evaluate the usability and clarity of the draft GLOBAL checklist in real-world settings.

You are eligible to participate in the pilot testing if before the end of September 2025 you are:

• Preparing a research article that reports a bibliometric analysis, or
• Acting as a peer reviewer for such an article.

We welcome participants from all disciplines and career stages, as long as they have experience with bibliometric studies.

If you are interested in taking part in the pilot, you can get started right away. We’ve already prepared everything you’ll need. Please download the following documents:

• The draft GLOBAL checklist
• The Elaboration and Explanation (E&E) document

For the pilot testing, please consider whether the manuscript which you are assessing clearly reports on each item in the GLOBAL checklist as outlined in the documents above. Once you have completed your assessment, please share your feedback via the pilot-test survey form.

Your input will directly inform the final version of the guideline, and contributors will be acknowledged in the final publication.

For more information on GLOBAL, please see the Scholcommlab website. If you have any questions regarding the pilot study, please email Jeremy Y. Ng. Thank you for helping shape the future of bibliometric reporting!

DOI: 10.59350/h16nz-g0c40 (export/download/cite this blog post)