As widely recognized, however, research address data at that level are tremendously confusing (e.g. The identification of benchmark units tends to be used for detecting comparable groups for university departments or research organizations at the equivalent level. Another reason for this situation might be the inferior data quality of research addresses. ( 2017, as cited in Rousseau, 2020) also consider that benchmarking of universities can be misleading, and indicate that “benchmarking is most meaningful between universities of a similar size” Field-normalized citation indicators that work well for large organizations and at a certain granularity of field classification may also be misleading for smaller organizations with a more narrow research focus (Ruiz-Castillo & Waltman, 2015 Zitt et al., 2005), where comparisons against relevant benchmarks may be more suitable. However, size still matters especially when evaluating the research performance of organizations that change in size over time (Andersen et al., 2017 Katz, 2000). One reason might be that normalized bibliometric indicators are frequently used to deal with differences in research fields and publication output between organizations, and this solution may be seen as sufficient. The explanations for the lack of studies on this topic might be threefold. ( 2017) develop a bibliometric-based approach for choosing proper benchmarks. ( 2012) propose a method for selecting peer universities and departments, and a study by Andersen et al. One is an early study by Noyons et al., ( 1999, in which they introduce a strategy to identify benchmarks for a micro-electronic research center. To our knowledge, only three studies have explored the identification of benchmark units. For this reason, as bibliometric researchers, we often receive commissions in relation to the identification of benchmark units from both university administrators and research funder managers.įew publications in the fields of scientometric studies and research evaluation have focused on this problem. Relatively often, comparison to benchmark organizations is also one of the cornerstones for further policy initiatives. They can further promote researchers to establish collaborations with colleagues at such organizations to learn and improve from benchmark units with excellent performance. Research organization managers, policymakers and research funding providers tend to use benchmark units as points of comparison for a given research body in order to understand and monitor its development and performance. In the practice of research management and evaluation, the identification of benchmark units is of importance. Identified benchmark units are evaluated by examining the research similarity and the robustness of various measures of connectivity. We apply this strategy to two research organizations in Sweden and examine the effectiveness of the proposed method. Four essential attributes for the evaluation of benchmarks are research topics, output, connectedness, and scientific impact. We define an appropriate benchmark as a well-connected research environment, in which researchers investigate similar topics and publish a similar number of publications compared to a given research organization during the same period. This study aims to propose a bibliometric approach for the identification of benchmark units. Even so, few studies have further explored this problem. Therefore, methods for identifying benchmark research units are of practical significance. In addition, benchmark organizations can also be used to pinpoint potential collaboration partners or competitors. Research organizations, policymakers and research funders tend to use benchmark units as points of comparison for a certain research unit in order to understand and monitor its development and performance. While normalized bibliometric indicators are expected to resolve the subject-field differences between organizations in research evaluations, the identification of reference organizations working on similar research topics is still of importance.
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