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.

This post is based on the following manuscript, currently under review: Tiokhin, L., Panchanathan, K., Lakens, D., Vazire, S., Morgan, T., & Zollman, K. (Preprint). Honest signaling in academic publishing, and is also published in the author's blog author's blog). “An article…is not the scholarship itself, it is merely advertising of the scholarship.” (Buckheit &

In a series of blog posts, we want to introduce the four principles of a new CWTS approach to research evaluation. Since 2017 we have been developing this approach in the context of several projects mainly assisting others with putting together the self-evaluation document of the Standard Evaluation Protocol.

The World Health Organization has declared a COVID-19 ‘infodemic’: an overabundance of information which is often mixed with rumours and misinformation. In light of this, CWTS researchers Giovanni Colavizza and Karlijn Roex are conducting a study in which they investigate how science is communicated during the coronavirus pandemic.

“What do you do for work?” is a common conversation starter at social gatherings. For doctors or teachers, this is easier to answer, but for members of the A-TEAM this is a question that requires a lengthy explanation. The short answer would be that we unify organizations in a database, but this does not cover all our work.

Today CWTS is releasing the 2020 edition of the CWTS Leiden Ranking. As always, the release of the ranking requires a major effort involving contributions from a large number of colleagues at our center. This year, the COVID-19 crisis, combined with a major update of the internal data infrastructure at CWTS, created additional challenges, which has unfortunately led to a delay of almost two months in the release of the ranking.

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.

There are many reasons why we should be concerned with how science is portrayed in the news media, particularly given the ‘infodemic’ related to COVID-19. For example, over-hyped research results can lead to misinterpretation that may contribute, among other things, to public skepticism and distrust towards science.

“Fund and forget”, that is how Jordi Molas-Gallart from the research centre Ingenio (CSIC-UPV) in València teasingly characterized the way large national research funders often operate. It’s also a point of departure for thinking about new ways of research evaluation. The cornerstones of many forms of research evaluation are peer review and bibliometric analysis.

*This post was originally published at Medium. * The value of open and interoperable metadata of scientific articles is increasingly being recognized, as demonstrated by the work of organizations such as Crossref, DataCite, and OpenCitations and by initiatives such as Metadata 2020 and the Initiative for Open Citations.

The world of research evaluation is changing. In particular, we observe a growing need in research organizations for interactive, formative and tailor-made evaluation services. In response to this need, a team of CWTS colleagues has developed a new approach in collaboration with Ad Prins that we call the Evaluative Inquiry.