In the pilot project “Identification of International Collaboration Opportunities” the basic principles for a bibliometric monitoring instrument for the identification of potential cooperation partners will be developed. The development of such an instrument is difficult for several reasons: First, certain subject fields are either complex, emerging or do not have clear-cut boundaries. They often traverse the respective classification systems and therefore make the field delineation even more complex. Second, it is not obvious at all how “the best” can be identified. Third, information is not only needed on the country and institutional level but individual scientists need to be identified as well, which poses high expectations about the quality of data.
In this method-oriented accompanying project especially the following questions will be tackled: Which techniques and methods can be used to delineate complex and emerging subject fields? What distinguishes potential international cooperation partners on various levels such as country, institution or individual scientists? How can the “results” of collaborations be measured? What influence do economies of scale have? How can dynamics of a subject field be measured and presented?
A technique will be developed and tested that delineates subject fields with the help of semantic technologies. Additionally new techniques for the characterization, identification and evaluation of potential cooperation partners will be developed and tested. Here especially those techniques that build on the analysis of cooperation and citation networks will be used. The aim of this research project is to use already established techniques as well as to develop and try new ones in order to make them usable for the monitoring instrument. The main focus is on the development and enhancement of methods for field delineation based on natural language processing (NLP) for classification of publications and of relative, scale free and relational indicators for the characterization of research efforts of countries, institutions and individual scientists.
