Bibliometric Analysis of the output of German Technological Universities by means of the J factor

The performance-oriented allocation of funds and excellence initiatives is now widespread in science and research and has led to questions concerning fair national and international bibliometric benchmarks for comparing scientific institutions becoming a hot topic. As publication and citation practices strongly depend on scientific fields, field normalisation is widely recognised as necessary for a fair comparison of figures in bibliometrics and evaluation studies. Ball, Mittermaier and Tunger (2009) recently presented a form of normalisation for the evaluation of citation data on multidisciplinary research. This method is based on the existing classification according to publishing journal and not the classification of output according to ISI subject categories. In order to calculate the J factor, a publication profile is created for each institution to be investigated. This profile takes account of the weighting of publications in a serial, represented by the number of publications as a proportion of the total output of the institution. In accordance with this weighting, the citation rate of each journal is compared to a qualified relative indicator. The final result is a relative citation rate J, which is the relative perception of the performance of an institution taking account of its publication and citation habits, and makes a transdisciplinary comparison possible. This presentation compares the scientific output of the institutions of nine major German universities of technology (TU9) by means of the citation rate and the J factor. A comparison with other popular rankings is also performed.