A large part of our daily work at CWTS consists of collecting, analyzing and presenting data - be it in our research, for institutional projects, or for our research agency. Over the years, CWTS has paid particular attention to developing conversational and participatory approaches to understand science and its dynamics.

Funding data (and the funding database) Funding acknowledgements are a familiar component of scholarly publications. In most cases, authors use this segment of the publication to list any grants, programs or other forms of financial support that made the research possible. In some cases, authors also use this space to express gratitude for any personal support they have received.

Bibliometric maps have been created for decades to provide overview of research and to make it possible for researchers to study different aspects of the research landscape, such as collaboration patterns, structure of research fields and citation relations. Several tools have been created that make it easy to create maps from bibliographic records imported from different data sources. Using these tools, maps can be created without any coding.

To tackle today’s societal challenges requires research collaboration across organizations and disciplines. Making research collaborations work is not always easy, especially when collaborations involve diverse organisations and stakeholders who do not necessarily share the same logics and objectives.

Peer review: Time well spent? Peer review is a time-consuming activity. In 2020 I received 73 invitations to review a new article submitted to a scientific journal. On average, reviewing an article, both the original version and possibly also subsequent revised versions, probably takes me about seven hours in total.

The Case of Marine Social Science The health of oceans and marine environments – key to both the climate and the global economy - is receiving growing societal attention.

On September 24 last year, the Initiative for Open Abstracts (I4OA) was launched. We started the initiative together with a group of colleagues working in the publishing industry, for scholarly infrastructure organizations, at university libraries, and at science studies research centers.

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.

Toward integration of data, computing, and tools Bibliometrics is often equated with straightforward numerical indicators like publication and citation counts, journal impact factors, and h-indices. Without any doubt these are indeed the most often used items in the bibliometric toolbox. However, the bibliometric toolbox is expanding in a number of important directions.

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?

The value of bibliometric visualizations Bibliometric visualizations are often presented as powerful tools for identifying the key patterns in large bibliometric data sets. However, not everyone is convinced of their value.