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The Use of Bibliometrics to Measure Research Performance in Education Sciences

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Abstract

This paper investigates the fitness-for-purpose and soundness of bibliometric parameters for measuring and elucidating the research performance of individual researchers in the field of education sciences in Switzerland. In order to take into account the specificities of publication practices of researchers in education sciences, the analyses are based on two separate databases: Web of Science and Google Scholar. Both databases show a very unequal distribution of the individual research output, and the indicators used to measure research performance (quantity of publications and citation impact) from the two data sources are highly positively correlated. However, individual characteristics of the researchers, such as age, gender and academic position, that serve to explain the great variance in research performance, can only be identified if the Web of Science is used as a benchmark of research performance. The results indicate that Google Scholar is so inclusive that it impedes a meaningful interpretation of the data. However, the Web of Science inclusion policy for journals is also associated with certain shortcomings that put some researchers at an unjustified disadvantage. Therefore, problems currently exist in regard to both citation databases when used to benchmark individual research performance.

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Notes

  1. http://www.admin.ch/ch/d/ff/2011/7455.pdf.

  2. http://www.hefce.ac.uk/research/funding/.

  3. www.eerqi.eu.

  4. http://www.crus.ch/information-programme/projekte-programme/projekt-mesurer-les-performances-de-la-recherche/projekt-2008-2011/initiativen.html?L=0%2F.

  5. Because Web of Science only includes publications that have been published in scientific journals that are listed in the Social Sciences Citation Index, even a purely quantitative analysis of these publications implies a qualitative element, as the vast majority of included articles will have been subjected to peer-review prior to acceptance for publication.

  6. Citations may be meaningless or have negative connotations and citation impacts may be inflated by "citation cartels" and self-cites.

  7. A heavy national focus/use of the national language was also observed in the German study by Dees (2008): 88 % of the publications analysed were written in German.

  8. Investigations in related social science research areas suggest that the skewed distribution for research performance is not solely explained by the fact that researchers differ in the types of publication they prefer and are more or less likely to be included in databases on that account. Researchers with a high level of publishing activity in one particular type of publication (monograph, book chapter, journal article) tend to have higher publishing outputs in respect of other types of publication as well (Puuska 2010). Nor is the skewed distribution likely to be due to a quantity versus quality trade-off; for instance, a study by Bernauer and Gilardi (2010) looking at political science shows that researchers who publish more articles also tend to have higher rates of publication in journals with a higher impact factor.

  9. In theory, this form of analysis would also be feasible with the data in this paper. In practice, the low overall number of observable professors is a prohibitive factor.

  10. However, the correlation is less strong and sometimes statistically not significant, when citations counts instead of number of publications are analysed (Aaltojärvi et al. 2008; McNally 2010).

  11. Van Raan et al. (2011) additionally find that non-English articles are also less often quoted leading to lower levels in the impact measures.

  12. They were identified based on a directory of the conference of Swiss university presidents (CRUS annuaire; updated version February 2010). The directory provides information about all professors working at Swiss universities by subject field.

  13. The small sample size of just 51 professors, even when taking into account the size of Switzerland (less than 8 million inhabitants) can be explained by two factors. Firstly, the higher education sector in Switzerland is smaller than in other countries of comparable population size and secondly, professors working in teacher training institutions are not counted, as teacher education (for teachers in compulsory schooling) is organized in specific universities of teacher training that do not have the right to award PhDs and are therefore less research bound. The advantage, however, in the case of Switzerland, is that all universities are considered to be “research universities” and therefore all professors working at these institutions should be assessed on the base of research excellence.

  14. Harzing (2007) Publish or Perish, version 3.1.3910 (www.harzing.com/pop.htm).

  15. For instance references to publishers or university homepages.

  16. Due to our limited database, methods accounting for different types of research output (see De Witte and Rogge 2010) can not be applied.

  17. The correlation persists if the publications published in both databases are taken out of the calculations.

  18. The self-citation rate is unknown. If it is similar to the self-citation rate in Web of Science, the associated bias is negligible.

  19. The Gini index is a standardized measure of the space between the Lorenz curve and the proportional line. If the Lorenz curve is equal to the proportional line (perfectly equal distribution) the value of the index is zero and for a totally unequal distribution (in our case only one professor would publish) the measure would be one. Therefore, the closer the value is to one, the more unequal is the distribution of the research output.

  20. Another possible explanation might be that long-standing researchers benefit from structural privileges due to their increasing fame/reputation (e.g. as regards allocation of research funding or inclusion of an article in a journal due to a position on the editorial board).

  21. Van Aalst (2010)'s findings indicate, however, that the obscured correlations (due to background noise) may be partly reduced by information about the specific types of publication (books, book chapters, dissertations, conference papers). This paper does not provide a more detailed attribution of Google Scholar publications because, firstly, attribution to a specific type of publication in itself tends to be the consequence of an arbitrary decision, and, secondly, not all of the links in Google Scholar actually enable access to a document (which, however, would be necessary for attribution to a specific form of publication).

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Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge Alexander Botte, Werner Dees, Daniel Munich, Olivier Rey and two anonymous referees for their helpful comments and suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Swiss Coordination Centre for Research in Education (SCCRE), Entfelderstrasse 61, 5000, Aarau, Switzerland

    Andrea Diem & Stefan C. Wolter

  2. University of Berne, Bern, Switzerland

    Stefan C. Wolter

  3. CESifo, Munich, Germany

    Stefan C. Wolter

  4. IZA, Bonn, Germany

    Stefan C. Wolter

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  1. Andrea Diem
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Correspondence to Andrea Diem.

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Diem, A., Wolter, S.C. The Use of Bibliometrics to Measure Research Performance in Education Sciences. Res High Educ 54, 86–114 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-012-9264-5

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