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Research Evaluation

Each research-intensive institution has a unique and characteristic profile
with respect to the research that is performed in this institute. This should be
taken into consideration during institutional and lab evaluation exercises.
The previous example illustrated the evaluation procedure for research
institutes and laboratories. A totally different approach was provided some
years ago by Noyons, Moed, and Luwel (1999) who combined a struc-
tural analysis, via mapping techniques, and a research performance assess-
ment to place a micro-electronics institute in an international context.

8.11 THE NATURE INDEX
The Nature Index is a database compiled by the Nature Publishing
Group (NPG) in collaboration with Digital Science, a sister company of
NPG, focusing on providing software for scientific purposes. It is based
on papers from so-called high-quality journals, independently chosen by a
committee of active researchers. The Nature Index is used to discuss
institutions, countries and articles and leads, as such, to a form of evalua-
tion. It provides three indices: article count (AC), a complete count mea-
sure; fractional count (FC), under the assumption that each author
contributes equally (complete normalized counting), and weighted frac-
tional count, which is FC but weighted to compensate for the overrepre-
sentation of papers in astronomy and astrophysics. It also provides a
collaboration score. These scores are derived from 68 journals and shown
depending on four fields: chemistry, earth & environmental sciences, life
sciences and physical sciences. From 2016 on it includes clinical sciences.
Results using the Nature Index have been published in several supple-
mentary issues of the journal. These include e.g., comparative data about
continents or subcontinents and cities in China.

8.12 REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS
8.12.1 Professional Evaluation Versus Amateur Bibliometrics

Francis Narin founded Computer Horizons Inc. in 1968, a company
devoted to the analysis of science and technology. As such, he and his team
were the first professional bibliometricians. In the early 80s similar groups,
but more directly connected to academia, such as SPRU (Brighton, UK)
under de guidance of Ben Martin; CWTS (Leiden, the Netherlands) under
de guidance of Ton van Raan and Henk Moed; ISSRU (Budapest,
Hungary) under the guidance of Tibor Braun, and FHG-ISI (Fraunhofer,