Enhancing open bibliometrics: A new role for national bibliometric infrastructures?
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Global bibliometric databases have become invaluable tools for researchers, research managers and science policymakers, but at the same time they fuel a tension between their unified product for a global market and the heterogeneous national science systems manifested in nationally oriented journals, publication in national languages, learned societies and science policies. Consequently, national bibliometric infrastructures based on national expertise have been set up in several countries not only to overcome this tension but to go beyond current limitations of these globally oriented bibliometric databases. By indexing and enriching locally highly relevant and valuable data, they open new analytical opportunities and insights which are not accessible through global databases.Increasing the visibility of the national research system and its outputs via a national infrastructure (1) allows for validated analyses of the national research system including the link to the global system for improved policy analyses, (2) facilitates the visibility of publications by underrepresented authors addressing open science ambitions (3) enables an inclusive, context-aware and responsible research evaluation. We will showcase how national infrastructures set up in Armenia, Georgia, Germany, Moldova and Ukraine work towards these goals and highlight their additional information value compared to global databases. This contribution aims to illustrate the indispensable role of these infrastructures for the evolving open bibliometric landscape and to initiate a discussion on how a network of national bibliometric infrastructures will progress not only open bibliometrics but also allow the infrastructures to fulfil their potential in informing the sciences and science-policy makers.
Source: Figshare
Authors: Stahlschmidt, Stephan, Cojocaru, Igor, Donner, Paul, Nazarovets, Serhii, Razmadze, Marina, Sargsyan, Shushanik
Language: English
Subfield: Library and Information Sciences
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7108217465