International research mobility is widely seen as a strategic tool to strengthen national research capacity and global competitiveness. Programmes like the Fulbright Program (US), the Sandwich Doctorate Programme (Brazil), Erasmus Programmes (EU), and China Scholarship Council (China) illustrate this global commitment.

Balancing opportunity and risk: rethinking China Scholarship Council programmes amid geopolitical tensions

Leiden University

Today CWTS released the Leiden Ranking 2025. We in fact released two editions of the ranking, the Traditional Edition and the Open Edition. The Leiden Ranking Traditional Edition is the name we use for the Leiden Ranking based on data from the Web of Science database. The Leiden Ranking Open Edition is the name of a new edition of the Leiden Ranking launched last year based on open data from the OpenAlex database.

The CWTS Leiden Ranking 2025 - More open, more inclusive, more informative

A shorter version of this blog post in Dutch has been published earlier on the website of Nederlandse UNESCO Commissie.

The withdrawal of the US from UNESCO: What does this mean for Open Science?

(


 Klik hier om de Nederlandse versie te lezen


 )

In any evaluation of scientific research, the obvious question is: how does a research unit compare with others, nationally and internationally? This question is easier to ask than to answer, because the answer is not easy to substantiate.

Benchmarking in research evaluations: we can do without it

The idea for this blog post emerged in the context of a special issue with the online journal

 Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics

. We, a group of researchers that can broadly be associated with science &amp; technology studies and meta-research, were invited by Frontiers to guest edit what they call a ‘Research Topic’, suggesting it could focus on innovations in peer review practices.

Reflections on guest editing a Frontiers journal

On a lively afternoon at the National Open Science Festival in Maastricht, we hosted an interactive session titled "The Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information – Developments in the Netherlands." Our aim was to jointly explore the challenges surrounding open research information, and brainstorm actionable solutions with a diverse audience of signatories and non-signatories alike.

Shaping the Future of Open Research Information - Reflections from the National Open Science Festival

When Wolfgang Kaltenbrunner, a researcher at Leiden University’s Centre for Science and Technology Studies, stumbled upon the Twitter feed STS Title Bot, he was immediately struck by its creativity and effortless verisimilitude. Despite being generated by an automated algorithm that has apparently been fed with data obtained through text mining, many titles could easily pass for actual publications in major STS journals.

Is there a typical journal article in the field of science and technology studies?

This article has been originally published at the TIB Blog.



At the TIB AV-Portal, we have created a service to watch the Altmetrics Conferences and Workshops.

You couldn't attend the Altmetrics conference? Fear not! We recorded everything you missed

Generative AI (genAI) is now ubiquitous in research. The field of academic publishing is struggling with an overwhelming mass of genAI slop and where to draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable genAI use. GenAI not only offers new opportunities, as is widely touted, but also creates numerous new problems and challenges, not least for responsible research. What does it mean to use genAI responsibly? Is it even possible?

Why AI transparency is not enough

In most scientific disciplines, the standard way to share new research findings is to publish a research article in a peer-reviewed journal. Increasingly, however, the standard approach to scientific publishing is complemented by alternative approaches, the most significant one being the publication of non-peer-reviewed research articles on preprint servers.

Crossref as a source of open bibliographic metadata for preprints

Institute projects at CWTS are projects that are acquired through different funding sources, such as Horizon2020, tenders set out by the European Commission, but also national funding, such as NWO in the Netherlands. Usually, we work on the institute projects within a consortium of multiple organisations, such as universities, public institutions, or sometimes companies.

A glimpse into the projects at CWTS

Sometimes, bringing home a message requires a more visual approach. That’s why recently, we teamed up with a graphic designer to create an infographic on the

 h

-index – or rather, on the reasons why not to use the

 h

-index.

Halt the h-index

How agriculture benefits from research through extension and engagement

Different sectors benefit from science in different ways. In the case of agriculture, innovations based on science often originate from providers of farmers, for example in the form of seeds or machinery. However, the diffusion or uptake of innovations is difficult, in particular for small farmers.

Why coverage matters: Invisibility of agricultural research from the Global South may be an obstacle to development

The course “Visualising Science Using VOSviewer”

VOSviewer was developed to construct various networks based on scientific literature. One type of maps is co-occurrence networks of essential terms. They provide an overview of the topics in the publications. Other networks are bibliometric; they are based on co-authorship or citations.

Visualising quantitative data with VOSviewer will widen your research projects

The Barcelona Declaration: a call for openness… but also for diversity and inclusion
 

The launch of the Barcelona Declaration last week aims to mobilise the global research community towards making research information open and accessible.

Not only Open, but also Diverse and Inclusive: Towards Decentralised and Federated Research Information Sources

A broad landscape of open research information systems

The landscape of open research information systems is broad. In addition to large (and global) open data sources like OpenAlex, OpenAIRE, or PubMed, we also have local or regional open data sources like SciELO, Redalyc or LaReferencia.

Towards the democratisation of open research information for scientometrics and science policy: the Campinas experience

Curtin University

When the Shanghai Ranking, also known as the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), was launched in 2003, Ton van Raan, director of CWTS at the time, sounded the alarm about the problematic way in which the ranking uses bibliometric data, for instance in attributing publications to universities.

Introducing the Leiden Ranking Open Edition

At CWTS, we have substantial expertise in research evaluation, including academic careers, institutional evaluation, journal evaluation, university rankings, responsibility and engagement, and open science. We regularly reach out to share our knowledge and foster good practice. But do we also ‘practice what we preach’? Are we doing enough to foster an appreciative working culture, to harbour a safe space, and to promote open dialogues?

Responsible Research Culture: Practicing what we preach at CWTS

Your paper is based on a huge amount of data. How did you manage to get access to so much data?

In the internal database system of CWTS, we have access to the raw data of Scopus, Web of Science, Dimensions, Crossref, and Microsoft Academic. CWTS is probably the only center in the world that has access to all this data, so we are in a unique position to compare the different data sources.

Comparing bibliographic data sources: Q&amp;A

This is our last blog post of the year. 2019 has been a very fruitful year for us, and we are looking forward to what 2020 will bring. For now, we would like to wish you a Merry Christmas and a new year full of scientific discoveries.

Happy holidays!

In the global research evaluation community, there is an increasing awareness of the importance of responsible evaluation. The current situation, with an emphasis on quantitative metrics, does not do justice to diversity between scientific fields, to different roles of researchers, or to the societal value of research. Moreover, studies have shown that researchers adjust their activities in anticipation of evaluations.

Responsible metrics for societal  value of scientific research

How can academic research systems enable more diverse profiles and career paths for academics? How can research assessment better recognize quality, content, creativity, and social relevance of research? Can academics be better rewarded for individual and team-based contributions, where appropriate?

Building knowledge infrastructure to support research assessment reforms: Dispatches from the Dutch Recognition and Rewards Festival 2022

El Leiden Ranking de Universidades 2023 ha sido publicado el 21 de junio del presente año. Contiene 1411 universidades de todo el mundo, incluyendo 58 de América Latina. Al abrir la página para 2023 encontramos en un listado a la Universidad de São Paulo en la posición 12 y la Universidad Nacional  Autónoma de México en la 98. Pero ¿qué significan estas posiciones?

Indicadores responsables y posiciones en rankings. ¿Qué significa una posición en el Leiden Ranking? [Spanish blog post]

In a previous post the SEP 2021-2027 was introduced. As a reminder: the Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU), the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) share the responsibility for the evaluation of all academic research units. According to the SEP 2021-2027, research units are evaluated in the light of their context, aims and strategy.

Research evaluation in context 3: The board, the research unit and the assessment committee

The Open Science (OS) movement has evolved in the last decades, with different actors taking different paths across the various dimensions of the OS concept. Contradictory implementation plans for open access and disparate visions of citizen science co-exist, and are often in conflict at the global scale.

The contested field of Open Science: a debate through the lens of inclusion

Although fraud and misconduct have always existed in research and scholarly communication, the rise of paper mills over the past decade has led to an unprecedented volume of fake or manipulated research being published. A 2022 report jointly published by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and the STM Association suggests that between 2 and 46% of submissions to journals in the time between 2019 and 2021 were produced by paper mills.

Advancing our Understanding of Systematic Manipulation &amp; Paper Mills: Wiley &amp; CWTS Partnership

Throughout a recent series of blog posts, we have been introducing the CWTS knowledge agenda for 2023-2028, which is divided into three new focal areas to organise our activities on specific themes.

Citizen Science in the CWTS Knowledge Agenda

A value-led perspective on Open Science
 

In 2021, UNESCO approved its Recommendation on Open Science (OS). By signing this recommendation, 193 countries made a commitment to support the development of OS with a vision of science as a global public good.

The UNESCO Open Science Outlook: OS progresses, but unequally

Over the past two decades, the open access movement has made significant progress in promoting the free

 accessibility

and

 reusability

of scholarly publications. About half of the publications from recent years are free to access and reuse. However, are accessibility and reusability sufficient for a well-functioning system of scholarly publishing?

Publications should be FAIR

Since 2017 we have been developing a new approach to research evaluation, which we call Evaluative Inquiry (EI). In a series of blog posts, we discuss the four principles of EI, based on our experiences in projects with the Protestant Theological University and with the University for Humanistics.

Evaluative Inquiry III: Mixing methods for evaluating research

Months into the corona crisis we are living in a world changed, for better or worse things are

 other

than they once were. It is obvious many countries were underprepared, but does it make sense to ask—could this have been otherwise? Indeed, this is a prodigious question, one unlikely to be answered comprehensively by a blog post.

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

Online or offline?

Where to begin? In the spring of this year – right as Europe’s “first wave” hit – we started thinking about how to organise our second-ever research retreat. We considered several options.

How can we organise team building and brainstorming online in times of corona?

Five years ago, we welcomed you to Leiden Madtrics through our first blog post. With the new blog, we wished to establish an active and engaging platform for our institute and our field to express ourselves – other than through scientific publications.

Celebrating 5 years of Leiden Madtrics

(


 To read the English version, click here


 )

Bij iedere evaluatie van wetenschappelijk onderzoek ligt de vraag voor de hand: hoe presteert een onderzoekseenheid in vergelijking met anderen, nationaal en internationaal? Die vraag is makkelijker gesteld dan beantwoord, want een antwoord laat zich niet gemakkelijk onderbouwen.

Benchmarking bij onderzoeks-evaluaties: we kunnen zonder

The need to increase the transparency of university rankings is widely recognized, for instance in the ten rules for ranking universities that we published in 2017, in the work done by the INORMS Research Evaluation Working Group, and also in a recent report by a Dutch expert group on university rankings (co-authored by one of us). It is therefore not surprising that the announcement of the Open Edition of the CWTS Leiden Ranking in 2023 got

Opening up the CWTS Leiden Ranking: Toward a decentralized and open model for data curation

In June 2022, the Council of the European Union gave the green light for a European Agreement on research assessment reforms to go ahead. Plans for this initiative were proposed in a European Commission scoping report in 2021.

What lies ahead for research assessment reforms in Europe?

Over the past decade, a growing number of bibliometric analyses of varying quality have been published in the peer-reviewed literature. Despite this growth, surprisingly few published articles provide guidance on how a bibliometric analysis ought to be reported. Moreover, to our knowledge, these articles have been written based on the opinions/experiences of different researchers, as opposed to best evidence-informed practices.

The GLOBAL initiative - Contribute to improving the reporting of bibliometric analyses

The origin of the phrase "publish or perish" was first questioned by Eugene Garfield (1996). He wrote that he had used the phrase in his speeches for thirty years, but had not heard anything about its origin. He consulted professors, librarians, dictionaries, and the Internet, but never found out who first suggested the phrase.

Origin and evolution of the "publish or perish" phenomenon

Studies on transdisciplinary research often focus on how different forms of expertise are brought together to build robust knowledge. However, in policy and legal affairs, there are many situations in which it is not possible to use new transdisciplinary knowledge due to contextual factors, such as urgency, political expediency, or lack of resources.

Concurrent Evidence: a framework for using evidence from multiple disciplines

Taking place in the beautiful sunny Lisbon, PIDapalooza 2020 feels like a festival from the start. With free festival t-shirts, wrist bands and a Nails and Instant Tattoos corner, participants easily got into the fun mood of the event. Some of those who have attended the previous editions of the event were wearing festive hats and t-shirts from the previous edition of the festival. I also picked up my first PIDapalooza merch.

PIDapalooza 2020, Lisbon

I would like to tell you about a book that changed my life, but I don’t want to spoil it yet by revealing the title. You see, since I was young, I had always anguished about career choices. I imagined that I would be forced to put hours into something I hate, and I would arrive home after work hating myself too.

The Book That Changed My Notion of Work

Some universities love to boast about their positions in university rankings, almost as if they were part of a football championship. However, these rankings were never intended to be used this way. This is common knowledge within the science and technology studies community, but the causes are open for debate. For example, who is to blame for the misuse?

Juan reads a paper part 1: The blame

This week, as I was browsing the CWTS fields of science (as used for the Leiden Ranking), just for fun, I found a field with the following labels:

 Feminism


 Politic


 Queer theory


 Space


 Home

There is something weird with these labels, I thought.

The Pain of Labeling Things

1. Find out about meta-science
 

Have you ever wondered how science is organized and measured? If scientists are studying their own topics, then who are studying the scientists and the knowledge that they produced? We at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) are one of the few research centers in the world who study this.

Welcome to Leiden Madtrics!

Background: Russian Academic Excellence Project 5top100
 

The Russian Academic Excellence Project 5top100 is a Russian excellence initiative in higher education that ran from 2013 to 2020. The aim of the initiative was to place five Russian universities in the top 100 of global university rankings. The goal was not achieved;

What Affects Research Productivity: View from Inside the University

Today CWTS published its open science policy on its website. This policy, which formally came into effect on September 1 this year, is the outcome of a co-creation process in which many CWTS colleagues participated in a period of one and a half years.

Practicing what we preach: Our journey toward open science

Academic research has become increasingly complex, multidisciplinary, collaborative, and transnational. The institutions that underpin research - including communication and evaluation systems - are trying to keep up, with varying levels of success. At the same time, our society is facing major challenges, including existential global health, welfare, and sustainability issues.

Introducing the CWTS knowledge agenda 2023-2028

The event

SciCon 2022 has been an online event seeking to bring together members of the academic metascience community and DeSci, to discuss some of the issues that exist in scientific research and highlight how DeSci efforts might contribute to improve the way we do science. SciCon has been organized by one of the leading DeSci initiatives: ResearchHub.

SciCon 2022: A look at Decentralized Science

One of the many puzzles of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the extent to which children are vulnerable to and spreaders of the virus. Fewer infection rates have been reported in children compared with adults, as have milder symptoms. But the infection rate in children is biased, given the testing policies in many countries.

Attention for science in step with policy? The case of school closures during COVID-19

This blogpost is a follow-up of the post by Carole de Bordes. She discusses a pre-covid19 workshop she attended on virtual meetings and conferences. Due to the Covid-19 crisis, we are currently experiencing a new way of working at CWTS. All staff needs to work from home. And besides the difficulties some colleagues are facing in this transition because of their home situations, most of the normal work could be taken up quite fast again.

Going back to normal?

Any conversation about research evaluation in the Netherlands has the risk of developing along this line. The Dutch way of evaluating academic research might not be unique, but it is certainly not common, nor fully understood. As a member of the working group for the monitoring and further development of the evaluation protocol – and as an employee of CWTS – let me provide insight and context.

Research evaluation in context 1: Introducing research evaluation in the Netherlands

RRI &amp; OS: two co-existing sets of ambitions

Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) and Open Science (OS) are two co-existing sets of ambitions concerning systemic change in the research and innovation (R&amp;I) system. Initially, RRI and OS may appear to align well.

Responsible Research &amp; Innovation or Open Science - does the label matter?

Research assessment has a long history continuously introducing new methods, tools, and agendas, for example, peer review of publications dating back to 17

 th

century and catalogues from the 19

 th

century that facilitated publication counting. This blog post discusses Responsible Research Assessment (RRA), an agenda gaining attention today.

Navigating Responsible Research Assessment Guidelines

Why is it important that Elsevier is going to open its citations?

Both DORA and the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) have called on publishers to make the reference lists of their articles openly available. In response to this, almost all large and medium-sized publishers have made their citations openly available in Crossref. Elsevier was one of the very few major publishers that have not yet opened their citations.

Q&amp;A about Elsevier's decision to open its citations

Many scholars at CWTS are now working hard, as they are elsewhere, to make some meaningful and helpful contribution in the current crisis. Being neither biomedical specialists, nor specifically engaged in topics related to disease or epidemics, a Science and Technology Studies research center like CWTS might not be the most logical of places to start doing Covid-19 related research projects.

Broadening the perspective on Covid-19

At CWTS, many researchers travel around the world to attend conferences, meet with relevant stakeholders, give lectures and/or provide trainings. But what are the costs of all these travels? There are many reasons to avoid flying and to facilitate virtual conferencing, including climate change, work pressure, and seeking to include a diverse audience.

Pre-COVID-19 workshop on virtual meetings and conferences

Leiden Madtrics

Every four years the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) and the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) join forces to organize the largest conference in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) in the world. From 16 to 19 July, 2024 the conference is hosted by the Athena Institute in Amsterdam.

CWTS at EASST-4S in Amsterdam

The new administration in the US is attacking science. Accepted grants and publications are forced to be retracted or altered if they contain forbidden words. Funding and peer review processes for biomedical research are grinding to a halt, and (open) governmental data are being taken down to reflect the views of the current political administration.

Strengthening science through diversity

The 28th International Conference on Science, Technology and Innovation Indicators (STI) 2024 is just around the corner, set to take place in Berlin on 18-20 September!

CWTS ventures Into the Great Wide Open

For centuries, the scientific community has relied on visual tools to communicate (complex) data. But what if we could listen to data as effortlessly as we read a graph? This question lies at the heart of data sonification, a practice that translates datasets into sound.

Metrics sonification as a new way to convey bibliometric data

How to find the most relevant scientific literature on topic X? How to evaluate the research carried out by department Y? And how to establish new strategic priorities for university Z? These are just a few examples of the many important decisions that researchers, research evaluators, and science policy makers need to make on a daily basis.

Toward open research information - Introducing the Information &amp; Openness focal area at CWTS

Greetings from Peru, nestled in the heart of the Andes, where I find myself reflecting on two transformative events in my scientific journey: the CWTS Scientometrics Summer School (CS

 3

) and the 27th International Conference on Science, Technology, and Innovation Indicators (STI 2023). As a bibliometrics enthusiast for the past two decades, this experience has been nothing short of a revelation—a journey that prompted me to question

New Horizons: A reflection on the Scientometrics Summer School and the STI 2023 Conference

CWTS is an interdisciplinary institute at Leiden University with a diverse multinational academic culture. PhD candidates, early career researchers, and visiting scholars from around the world gather at CWTS to pursue their research journeys. The journey can be an inspiring yet challenging experience.

Introducing the CWTS ECR/PhD Council

I’ for invention

Academic researchers and inventors are explorers – boldly going where no one has gone before. Most people agree on this. However, the relevance of their discoveries or breakthroughs is perceived very differently by different groups, at least when it comes down to technology transfer of that invention from universities to companies.

University technology transfer: 'it's not a business, but run it like a business‘

European and global science policy have been restructured around ‘global challenges’ and ‘research excellence’ to commit to societal impact. Our current global challenges, including climate change, destruction of nature, and increasing global inequality, require critical interrogation of the contributions and consequences of science.

Doing science in times of climate breakdown

(The Spanish version of this blog post is available here).

The project, funded by Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC), is led by the Latin American Forum for Scientific Evaluation (FOLEC) of the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO), in collaboration with the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) at Leiden University and SIRIS Academic.

 International funding circuits are not neutral;

Analysing research funding flows in the Global South

Academia today finds itself in a paradox. The ‘publish or perish’ mantra has spiralled into an uncalled race, where the finish line is

 quantity

, and not

 quality

. In this obsession to stack CVs with publication credits, research quality and integrity often suffer. Between 2018 and 2022, research articles witnessed a 22.78 per cent growth to 5.14 million. Yet concerns over research integrity persist.

Academic publishing – stuck in a prisoner’s dilemma?

A preprint is a research article that is made openly available on a preprint server, typically before submission to a peer-reviewed journal. Preprinting enables new scientific knowledge to be shared in a timely and open way. It often takes many months or even years for an article to pass through the peer review process of a journal.

The state of preprinting in Europe and the Netherlands

In early 2023, CWTS introduced a new organisational structure of so-called focal areas to address the challenges outlined in its knowledge agenda. As discussed in a previous post, the knowledge agenda is not another research agenda, but rather combines research and intervention around the mission of CWTS to better understand how research is practiced and governed, and how it serves society. The focal area Evaluation &amp;

Setting the course: our first two years in the focal area Evaluation &amp; Culture

The transition towards open research practices has been a longstanding priority for Dutch academics. Over the last decade, the bottom-up support for open research practices has been accompanied by consolidated, national-level support. This country-level initiative has resulted in the 2017 National Plan for Open Science (NPOS) and the 2022 Open Science in 2030 in the Netherlands.

Monitoring Open Science in The Netherlands

Open science initiatives have increased the amount of (openly) available research data. Such data are often shared with the idea that they will be reused, although reuse is far from being guaranteed. Working to bridge the distance between data producers and data consumers has been suggested as one possible way to facilitate the reuse of existing data supplies.

Reusing data: bridging the distance between data consumers and producers

Introduction

Independent 10 researchers are a diverse category of researchers, from those who want to pursue their own path to the ones who are struggling to stay within the competitive world of academia. We define independent researchers broadly as people who conduct research without an institutional affiliation.

Independent researchers: traces in bibliographic data

Since the inception of ChatGPT in late 2022, the question of how AI will change academia is a concern in almost every discipline. Social media and mailing lists alike are flooded with suggestions for new AI-based tools, workflows, or seminars. At the same time, many journal publications now come with some form of AI involvement – from analyzing and interpreting data to the drafting of whole sections.

Will ChatGPT Get Tenure?

The 2021

 UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science

sets out an ambitious vision for transforming research towards making science a global public good. In addition to continued support for the increased openness of research products (publications, data, software), this document foregrounds the transformative potential of open research practices to enhance equity and inclusiveness within global research.

Interrogating and Monitoring Equitable Open Science

The release of the first Open Edition of the CWTS Leiden Ranking in January this year triggered an overwhelming response. It was covered by various news media, including Research Professional, AEF info, and TheMetaNews, and was endorsed by important stakeholders such as the International Science Council, the French Committee for Open Science, and the National Agency for Research and Development in Chile.

Launch of the CWTS Leiden Ranking Open Edition 2024

English version below


 .

Vorige week werd in de Rijksbegroting een halvering van het budget van Open Science NL aangekondigd. Open Science NL, een zogeheten regieorgaan van NWO, heeft als opdracht om de transitie naar open science in Nederland te stimuleren en versnellen, met als doel dat open science de norm wordt.

Bezuiniging op Open Science NL, superzonde!

Introduction

On August 21, 2022, we made available the first version of our dataset of scholars on Twitter created with two open data sources: Crossref Event Data and OpenAlex.

An update on the Scholars on Twitter dataset

Open Science at CWTS in retrospect
 

Leiden University sees Open Science (OS) as a key element on the path towards making greater scientific and societal impact and fostering research quality and integrity.

Walking the talk: a peek into Open Science practices at CWTS

Scholarly book evaluation often prioritises ‘prestige’, which leads to inconsistent and unfair outcomes. My previous research shows that such systems consider neither the intrinsic quality of the research nor the accessibility of the work itself.

Global reach, local insights: Using book ISBNs to map publishing behaviour

Imagine national science policy as a musical chair game. The contestants are the science system actors, such as researchers, research groups, universities, companies, among others. Some actors can have more expertise dancing at the rhythm of

 salsa

than

 hip-hop,

while others might be more agile in finding a seat when the music pauses. The government plays or pauses the music, modulates its speed or changes the genre.

The changing tunes of science policy: mapping research priorities of consecutive governments

Classifying research publications into research topics or research areas is crucial for many bibliometric analyses. While there are lots of approaches for classifying publications, most of these approaches lack transparency.

An open approach for classifying research publications

On the occasion of the 2023 Nobel Prize announcements, the Rijksmuseum Boerhaave symposium “

 Does science need heroes?”

attempted to explore the evolution of prize cultures over time and examine the current and potential roles of prizes in contemporary scientific practices.

Does science need heroes?

Open science was one of the key topics at the Science, Technology and Innovation Indicators (STI) conference that CWTS organised in September 2023 in Leiden, the Netherlands. Open science was not only discussed at the conference but was also put into practice in the publication and peer review process of the conference. By way of experiment, all papers submitted to the conference were published as a preprint before they were peer reviewed.

Preprinting and open peer review at the STI 2023 conference: Evaluation of an open science experiment

The CWTS Leiden Ranking has always been a bit different from other university rankings. It has never sought to identify an overall ‘winner’ from amongst all the universities it features, preferring instead to offer a range of indicators and rank institutions on each one separately. It also looks beyond traditional citation measures and reputation surveys to assess concepts such as open access and gender balance.

The Leiden Ranking goes beyond ranking

Research assessment practices that largely rely on publication-driven assessments of research(ers) are slowly running out of steam. A remnant of a science system that is largely inward-focused and output-oriented, these assessments paint a rather monochrome picture of science that is not fit for today’s developments that reconfigure the relationship between science and society.

Research(er) assessment that considers open science

Universities in the Leiden Ranking 2023

As Figure 1 shows, the number of universities in the Leiden Ranking keeps increasing. Like in the last three editions of the ranking, a university needs to have at least 800 fractionally counted publications in the most recent four-year time window to be included in the ranking. This year 1411 universities meet this criterion, 93 more than last year and 235 more than in 2020.

The CWTS Leiden Ranking 2023

Imagine academic publishing that is fast, transparent, and free. Is that a pipe dream or something within reach? We already have preprint publishing (fast), open peer review (transparent), and diamond/overlay journals (free). If we could connect these disparate initiatives, would that make our dream come true? And how could this best be done? These are questions that are currently being discussed by us and others at Leiden University.

"Smart alone, brilliant together"

In a previous blog post we introduced the CWTS knowledge agenda 2023-2028. Building on this, in the current post we present the new focal areas in which CWTS organizes its activities.

The focal areas of CWTS

The scientific community is moving towards a more transparent way of conducting and reporting research. Scientific publications are becoming more and more openly accessible but openness should also extend to peer review, preprinting, preregistration, data sharing, metadata availability, and related issues.Research funders and other stakeholders are putting a significant effort into promoting open science practices in scholarly communication.

The Journal Observatory - Connecting information on scholarly communication

Since its very beginnings, Wikipedia has been the target of criticism. The first (and negative) comparisons of its contents with those of other encyclopaedias are long gone, although the perception from academia was more optimistic. However, in education, the terrain in which this platform is most valuable, the controversy is greater. Its established use among students collides completely with the sceptical perception of part of the teachers.

Five key facts to consider when studying science on Wikipedia

Industry-University partnership is now part of the governance canon of higher education. However, the multiple forms this type of partnership can adopt are not so clear for every junior-faculty, administrators, and from there to the top-management in the higher education sector.

Industry involved in research: The case of Latin America and the Caribbean

Most researchers will only think of their Curriculum Vitae (CV) when an application deadline is nearing. Yet a recent wave of initiatives to introduce so-called narrative CV formats by research funding bodies and universities across Europe have created debate about the affordances of an otherwise taken-for-granted bureaucratic genre.

Narrative CVs: a new challenge and research agenda

The adoption of open science practices has become a prominent topic of study for the science studies community. However, the research practices of the community itself are still quite traditional.

Experimenting with open science practices at the STI 2023 conference

The year is almost over. 2022 was not just another year for the Leiden Madtrics blog, but came with quite a variety of blog posts. We (the blog team) had a lot of fun editing all of them and are proud of our authors. They did an amazing job.  At the same time, this year diversified our social media presence: Leiden Madtrics, along with CWTS, can now be found on Mastodon as well, while the institute also launched its own Mastodon instance.

Happy Holidays!

In June of this year, the Open Research Funders Group (ORFG) published an open letter to the wider academic community with a call towards improving research output tracking. Funding acknowledgments were a particular focal point. In the previous blog post in this series, we already addressed several issues at play in funding acknowledgment data sets.

Acknowledging the Difficulties: A Case Study of a Funding Text

Researchers collaborate across borders and continents. Students go on exchange and go study abroad. Nothing new so far. Yet formalised international strategic partnerships between universities are more recent. These agreements include both research and education and cover a range of departments. And they are expected to contribute to strategic goals and have great impact.

We need to talk about our partnership: lessons from the EVALUATE project

Created in 1992, the UNITWIN/UNESCO Chair programme is intended to support developing expertise in areas related to UNESCO’s mandate, such as education, culture, communication and the natural and social sciences. This network of over 850 institutions in 117 countries mobilises knowledge to address pressing societal challenges and contribute to development.

Why are diversity and inclusion important for Global Science?

Why is it important that abstracts are made openly available?

In a blog post that we published two years ago together with our colleague Aaron Tay, we discussed numerous ways in which open abstracts can be of great value. This includes scientific literature search, both using traditional query-based search tools and using more advanced text mining and visualization tools.

Q&amp;A about Wiley's decision to open its abstracts

The learnings have been presented and published in different shapes and forms, book chapters, working papers, reports, many deliverables, publications, and presentations. Here we present the breadth and depth of the work by linking it to the SUPER MoRRI blogpost series and turning them into an overarching story in two episodes.

Leiden Madtrics

Mapping science using Microsoft Academic data

Why are global health needs unmet by research efforts?