Bornmann and Leydesdorff (2011) proposed methods based on Web of Science data to identify field-specific excellence in cities where highly cited papers were published more frequently than can be expected. Top performers in output are cities in which authors are located who publish a number of highly cited papers that is statistically significantly higher than can be expected for these cities. U...

In this study, we discover Russian “centers of excellence” and explore patterns of their collaboration with each other and with foreign partners. Highly cited papers serve as a proxy for “excellence” and coauthored papers as a measure of collaborative efforts. We find that currently research institutes (of the Russian Academy of Sciences as well as others) remain the key players despite recent ...

Over the last few decades, the institutionalisation of quantitative research evaluations has created incentives for scholars to publish as many papers as possible. This paper assesses the effects of such incentives on individual researchers' scientific impact, by analysing the relationship between their number of articles and their proportion of highly cited papers. In other words, does the sha...

As the subject of research excellence has received increasing attention (in science policy) over the last few decades, increasing numbers of bibliometric studies have been published dealing with excellent papers. However, many different methods have been used in these studies to identify excellent papers. The present quantitative analysis of the literature has been carried out in order to acqui...