Eine Übersicht der problematischen Aspekte bibliometrischer Masseinheiten.

This chapter provides an overview of bibliometric methods, from the development of citation indexing as a tool for information retrieval to its application in research evaluation, and discusses their misuse and effects on researchers’ scholarly communication behavior.

The goal of this chapter is to inform the reader about bibliometrics in research assessment and explain possiblilities and limitations. The chapter starts with a brief historic summary of the field and the developments of its methods, which provides the context in which the measurement of scholarly communication developed. An overview of indicators and their limitations is then provided, followed by their adverse effects and influence on researchers’ scholarly communication behavior. The chapter concludes by summarizing the possibilities and limitations of bibliometric methods in research evaluation.

This chapter has reviewed the framework, methods and indicators used in bibliometrics, focusing on its application in research evaluation, as well some of its adverse effects on researchers’ scholarly communication behavior. It has argued that such indicators should be interpreted with caution, as they do not represent research activity—let alone scientific impact—but, rather, are indicators of such concepts. Also, they are far from representing the whole spectrum of research and scientific activities, as research does not necessarily lead to publication. Along these lines, bibliometric indicators do not provide any insights on the social or economic impact of research and are, thus, limited to assessing the impact of research within the scientific community. Hence, these indicators have to be triangulated and applied carefully, adapted to the units that are assessed.

Researchers are used to being evaluated: publications, hiring, tenure and funding decisions are all based on the evaluation of research. Traditionally, this evaluation relied on judgement of peers but, in the light of limited resources and increased bureaucratization of science, peer review is getting more and more replaced or complemented with bibliometric methods. Central to the introduction of bibliometrics in research evaluation was the creation of the Science Citation Index (SCI) in the 1960s, a citation database initially developed for the retrieval of scientific information. Embedded in this database was the Impact Factor, first used as a tool for the selection of journals to cover in the SCI, which then became a synonym for journal quality and academic prestige. Over the last 10 years, this indicator became powerful enough to influence researchers´ publication patterns in so far as it became one of the most important criteria to select a publication venue. Regardless of its many flaws as a journal metric and its inadequacy as a predictor of citations on the paper level, it became the go-to indicator of research quality and was used and misused by authors, editors, publishers and research policy makers alike. The h-index, introduced as an indicator of both output and impact combined in one simple number, has experienced a similar fate, mainly due to simplicity and availability. Despite their massive use, these measures are too simple to capture the complexity and multiple dimensions of research output and impact. This chapter provides an overview of bibliometric methods, from the development of citation indexing as a tool for information retrieval to its application in research evaluation, and discusses their misuse and effects on researchers´ scholarly communication behavior.