The assessment of the performance of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) at the micro (institutional), meso (regional) and macro (country) level is an important and recurrent question in the... Show moreThe assessment of the performance of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) at the micro (institutional), meso (regional) and macro (country) level is an important and recurrent question in the higher education’s policy debate. However, the analysis of the performance of HE systems is far from being easy to deal with. One of the main critical issues to address properly the assessment of performance, in a multi-level (systemic) perspective, is the consideration of the heterogeneity of the HEIs involved. There are different sources of heterogeneity, including the mission, the national context, the presence or absence of medical schools, the legal status and the disciplinary orientation and degree of specialization. Among the heterogeneity factors of HEIs, disciplinary specialization or subject mix is considered one of the most relevant. This paper addresses the issue of heterogeneity in its multidimensional faces by adopting two approaches. The first is integrating heterogeneous sources of available data, and the second the application of advanced econometric techniques, which allow comparing or benchmarking HEIs by capturing observed and unobserved heterogeneity. Show less
Trends are analysed in the annual number of documents published by Russian institutions and indexed in Scopus and Web of Science, giving special attention to the time period starting with the year... Show moreTrends are analysed in the annual number of documents published by Russian institutions and indexed in Scopus and Web of Science, giving special attention to the time period starting with the year 2013 in which the Project 5-100 was launched by the Russian Government. Numbers are broken down by document type, publication language, type of source, research discipline, BRIC country and source. It is concluded that publication counts strongly depend upon the database used, and upon changes in database coverage, and that one should be cautious when using indicators derived from WoS, and especially from Scopus, as tools in the measurement of research performance of the Russian science system. Show less
Robinson-Garcia, N.; Arroyo-Machado, W.; Moed, H.F.; Torres-Salinas, D. 2018
The promotion of Open Science needs new metrics that encourage openness in scientific practices, and can help institutions to monitor it. In 2017, the European Commission (EC) created an Expert... Show moreThe promotion of Open Science needs new metrics that encourage openness in scientific practices, and can help institutions to monitor it. In 2017, the European Commission (EC) created an Expert Group with the task of informing the commission on the possibility of including altmetric indicators as potential metrics that could foster and monitor open science advancements, but it failed to show how these metrics can help to foster Open Science. The current paper analyses differences in altmetric scores between Green OA publications, Gold OA publications and non OA publications. The goal of the paper is to empirically study whether altmetric indicators reinforce Open Access practices regardless of the type of access. We report a preliminary analysis based on two Physics journals. Our results show that gold OA documents are best covered in Altmetric.com and receive higher mentions than documents with other types of access. This is especially troublesome in the case of green OA, as it reflects that altmetric indicators do promote a very specific type of access closely linked with the publishing industry. Show less
