Honest signaling in academic publishing

Scientific publishing has become a game between scientists and journals. Scientists try to convince the journals to publish their papers, while journals try to filter-out low-quality papers while being overwhelmed with too many submissions. Is there a smarter way? Honest signaling may be the key.

Leo Tiokhin • July 22, 2020

Evaluative Inquiry II: Evaluating research in context

We know that academic knowledge production happens in context, yet, when assessing research, we undervalue the influence of stakeholders and organizational contexts on academic output and impact. The second of four blogposts is on evaluating research in context.

Tjitske Holtrop, Laurens Hessels and Ad Prins • July 20, 2020

Survey: Doing science in times of COVID-19

We are conducting a new study to understand how science is communicated during the coronavirus pandemic. All academic researchers, whether they are studying COVID-19 or not, are invited to undertake our survey

Karlijn Roex and Giovanni Colavizza • July 13, 2020

A-TEAM: A stands for a very challenging job

As the A-TEAM, we thoroughly evaluate the data we collect, and aim to provide a consistent and transparent curation. What we do could also be described as that of a detective/archeologist/archivist: through bits and pieces of data we seek to unravel the scientific landscape.

Zeynep Anli, Clara Calero-Medina and Andrea Reyes Elizondo • July 09, 2020

The CWTS Leiden Ranking 2020

At CWTS, we have just released a new edition of our Leiden Ranking. In this post, the core members of the Leiden Ranking team provide a quick update and illustrate some of the insights provided by the ranking.

Ludo Waltman, Zeynep Anli, Clara Calero-Medina, Mark Neijssel, Andrea Reyes Elizondo, Nees Jan van Eck and Martijn Visser • July 08, 2020

Could pre-Covid-19 research into coronaviruses have been otherwise? Episode one: Careers

Could coronavirus-related research (CRR) pre-Covid-19 have been otherwise? In this series we examine pre-pandemic publications in CRR, asking how issues of careers, funding, and geopolitics may have affected the state of knowledge in CRR. Ep.1: Careers.

Sarah Rose Bieszczad, Jochem Zuijderwijk and Thed van Leeuwen • July 07, 2020

COVID-19 research in the news: Visualizing the sentiment and topics in science news about the pandemic

Every day news outlets around the world play a central role in disseminating the latest COVID-19 research. In this post, we discuss the impact of COVID-19 findings on the news by applying state-of-the-art sentiment analysis and present some interesting preliminary results, stay tuned!

Márcia R. Ferreira, Bijan Ranjbar-Sahraei and Rodrigo Costas • July 06, 2020

From ‘fund and forget’ to formative and participatory research evaluation

A trend in research evaluation is to include stakeholders as active partners in the evaluation process. In June, CWTS organized an online workshop to explore novel evaluation approaches and to identify possibilities and limitations for co-production in research evaluation.

Rinze Benedictus, Laurens Hessels, Ismael Ràfols and Ingeborg Meijer • July 03, 2020

Why openly available abstracts are important — overview of the current state of affairs

Openness of the metadata of scientific articles is increasingly being discussed. In this blog post, Aaron Tay (SMU Libraries, Singapore Management University), Bianca Kramer (Utrecht University Library), and Ludo Waltman (CWTS, Leiden University) discuss the value of openly available abstracts.

Aaron Tay, Bianca Kramer and Ludo Waltman • June 30, 2020