Some universities love to boast about their positions in university rankings, almost as if they were part of a football championship. However, these rankings were never intended to be used this way. This is common knowledge within the science and technology studies community, but the causes are open for debate. For example, who is to blame for the misuse?

This is our last blog post of the year. 2019 has been a very fruitful year for us, and we are looking forward to what 2020 will bring. For now, we would like to wish you a Merry Christmas and a new year full of scientific discoveries.

I'm sure the following scenario is familiar to most of the readers: You're writing a new scientific paper and are scanning the reference lists of your most important sources to see if you've missed anything interesting, maybe even a seminal paper cited by several of your current sources. Recently, a couple of web apps have come up to simplify this process by constructing and visualizing the underlying citation networks.

I recently visited CWTS to discuss and present my PhD project, which is about the algorithmic classification of research publications. My previous experiences when working with this topic and the discussions during my week at CWTS led me to further consider the question about what holds a research field together.

Last week I had the pleasure of participating in Crossref LIVE19 and of giving a short flash talk on ‘the value of Crossref’. Crossref LIVE19 took place in Amsterdam and was attended by over 100 participants, many of them representing scholarly publishers and other Crossref member organizations.

How does the research profile of pharma companies look like? What diseases are these companies investigating? What are their main research partners? Where are their laboratories and collaborators located? These are relevant questions for those interested on R&D dynamics in the pharmaceutical sector. However, this type of information is often not publicly available and, when it is available, it is often fragmented.

1. Find out about meta-science Have you ever wondered how science is organized and measured? If scientists are studying their own topics, then who are studying the scientists and the knowledge that they produced? We at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) are one of the few research centers in the world who study this.

The conference The impact of science is discussed in different formats and venues nowadays, and an example that stands out is the Impact of Science conference that was organised by the Network for Advancing and Evaluating the Societal Impact of Science (AESIS Network). The importance of impact of science becomes obvious, by taking into account, that this conference has been held six times before coming to

This week, as I was browsing the CWTS fields of science (as used for the Leiden Ranking), just for fun, I found a field with the following labels: Feminism Politic Queer theory Space Home There is something weird with these labels, I thought.

One of the most exciting developments in the past few years in the field of bibliometrics is the emergence of a number of important new data sources. Dimensions, created by Digital Science and made openly available for research purposes, is a prominent example. Other examples are Crossref and OpenCitations, which provide data that is fully open. The launch of Microsoft Academic in 2016 also represents a significant development.

Research efforts in health are well known to have unequal distributions: there is much more research on diseases more prevalent in rich countries than in diseases more prevalent in poorer countries. Why is this imbalance so persistent in spite of initiatives to support health research in the global south?