Dr. Sabrina Petersohn

Heterogeneous reporting requirements and increasing expectations of strategic capacity building have prompted German research institutions to implement advanced database and information systems in order to improve their management of metadata on research activities, processes and outcomes (research information). Implementation and use of these systems in research reporting require specific expertise, opening up new task areas which have so far not been sufficiently studied. Based on a national survey among personnel responsible for IT-based research reporting in German Higher Education and research institutions, the contribution assesses whether research information management constitutes a new specialization in research management.

Since the 2000s, the digitization of bibliometric infrastructure has accelerated at a rapid pace. In this article, we analyse how these developments in evaluative bibliometrics have contributed to an extension of indicator-based research evaluation towards data-driven research analytics. Drawing on empirical material from blogs and websites as well as from research and policy papers, we discuss how interoperability, scalability, and flexibility as material specificities of digital infrastructures generate new ways of data production and their assessment, which affect the possibilities of how academic performance can be understood and (e)valuated.

The proliferation of quantitative research assessment has been accompanied by an increasing growth and diversification of digital infrastructure for evaluative bibliometrics. Since the beginning of the 2000s, insights into academic performance provided by a variety of new databases and devices significantly exceed the capacities of the former Science Citation Index and embedded metrics. Going beyond the research on the construction, uses, and consequences of bibliometric indicators, we therefore posit that a perspective on bibliometric infrastructure is crucial for understanding how evaluative bibliometrics is put into practice.

Whilst libraries have already developed new specializations as curators of research data, we ask which role the collection and processing of research information will play as a research support service in academic libraries and how this affects their task and competency profiles in the future. Based on an analysis of job advertisements for the years 2005 to 2020 and an online survey, we identify formal tasks and competency requirements as well as current task profiles and perceived areas of competency.

Repeated calls for responsible research metrics and professional codes of conduct in evaluative bibliometrics highlight the need to investigate which qualifications and competencies enable a proficient application of bibliometric methods and indicators. Taking competence research as a point of departure, this chapter delineates salient dimensions of professional competence in bibliometric research evaluation by reviewing a selected subset of the literature. The reviewed literature focuses on handbooks, monographs, and scholarly and practitioner articles that introduce theory and methodology of bibliometrics and showcase applications to scholars and practitioners mainly outside of the scientometric research community.