During recent years, bibliometric studies have become increasingly important in evaluating individual scientists, institutes, and entire observatories. In astronomy, often librarians are involved in maintaining publication databases and compiling statistics for their institutions. In this paper, we present a look behind the scenes to understand who is interested in bibliometric statistics, whic...

Problems and Theories The head of a prestigious scientific institution recently said, by paraphrasing a famous quotation: "we solve problems that are posed, not that we pose". This view totally misses the history and role of human knowledge construction and prepares wrong ways for evaluating it. Science is not problem solving, it is theory building. Any relevant, difficult problem requires the ...

This paper studies Spanish scientific production in Economics from 1994 to 2004. It focuses on aspects that have received little attention in other bibliometric studies, such as the impact of research and the role of scientific collaborations in the publications produced by Spanish universities. Our results show that national research networks have played a fundamental role in the increase in S...

This paper introduces a bibliometric, citation network-based method for assessing the social validation of novel research, and applies this method to the development of high-throughput toxicology research at the US Environmental Protection Agency. Social validation refers to the acceptance of novel research methods by a relevant scientific community; it is formally independent of the technical ...

In addition to shaping social networks, for example, in terms of co-authorship relations, scientific communications induce and reproduce cognitive structures. Scientific literature is intellectually organized in terms of disciplines and specialties; these structures are reproduced and networked reflexively by making references to the authors, concepts and texts embedded in these literatures. Th...