Quality and quantity indices in science: use of visualization tools.

©2009 EUROPEAN MOLECULAR BIOLOGY ORGANIZATION 800 correspondence correspondence Quality and quantity indices in science: use of visualization tools R ecent articles in EMBO reports have addressed the issues of decreasing research funding (Wolinsky, 2009) and the importance of research evaluation (Bornmann & Daniel, 2009). Both topics are directly connected to one other. In the light of stagnant or even decreasing private and public funding for research, precise rules for funding policies have become indispensable in order to identify good research projects and proposals. The use of benchmarking systems to assess the quality of research is therefore an important feature of implementing an efficient funding policy. Although individual scientometric and biblio metric methods can be used to analyse the research activities of faculties or single scientists, these techniques often do not provide a larger picture of scientific quality and quantity in relation to funding. Without the use of scientometric methods and other techniques to analyse whether existing funding schemes are successful or not, there will be a growing disrespect for funding policies among scientists. To address this, we present an example of how to visualize research quantity and quality across the European Union (EU). Reviews of European research funding and other comments make it clear