RESEARCH PERFORMANCE INDICATORS FOR UNIVERSITY DEPARTMENTS - A STUDY OF AN AGRICULTURAL UNIVERSITY

The present bibliometric study extends previous work by focusing on th e research performance of departments in the natural and life sciences , the social and behavioral sciences, and the humanities. The present study covers all 70 departments from one agricultural university, and several veterinary departments of a second university. The impact anal ysis was extended by including other types of documents than journal a rticles. For about a third of the departments, publications not covere d in citation indexes accounted for at least 30% of the citations to t heir total oeuvre. To deal with different citation and publication hab its in the various fields, both short-term and medium-term impact asse ssments were made. The commonly used three year window is not universa lly applicable, as our results show. The inclusion of self-citations f orms an important source of error in the ratio of actual/expected impa ct. To cope with this, the trend and level of self-citations was compa red at university level with that in a matched sample of publications. Moreover, at a departmental level, self-citation rates were used to d etect departments with divergent levels of self-citation. The expected impact of journals accounted for only 18% of the variance in actual i mpact. Comparison of bibliometric indicators with two peer evaluations showed that the bibliometric impact analyses provided important addit ional information.