Policy Brief, Issue 4/Revealing dynamics, structure, and societal connections. How advanced bibliometrics support science policy analysis

Leiden University’s study aims to demonstrate the added value of advanced bibliometrics analyses in the context of science policy, beyond its conventional uses in research evaluation. The analyses takes into consideration the example of cancer research to illustrate the potential of bibliometric data to reveal information beyond counting publications and citations, and specifically to gain insights into the dynamics of a research field or organisation, its structure and its different ways in which research is connected to societal processes. The bibliometric analyses have been conducted using the RISIS CWTS publication Dataset. The power of advanced bibliometrics is its capacity to analyse and contextualize a research group, a university, a discipline, regions, countries or group of countries. Thus, the study encourages science policy analysists to make use of advanced scientometric techniques to support decision making. In addition, it will show how bibliometrics can support benchmarking of countries and types of cancer across a variety of properties – not only number of publications and citations, but also the extent to which these publications are mentioned in social media, are cited in patents, are produced in local hospitals, in local languages (non-English), in collaboration with industry, etc. In the area of cancer research, this multidimensional perspective could help science policy analysts to identify specific research areas which might be candidates to be funded and/or to better understand and reflect on how the cancer mission evolves across Europe