In this webinar, Malte Vogl and Bernardo Buarque from the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science cover how Dimensions can be used for historical research.
The use of bibliometrics resources for historical research poses different challenges than those we see commonly in their analyses for the evaluation of researchers and institutions.
Any involved historian will immediately ask questions, such as:
- ‘How complete is the dataset?”
- ‘Can FOR categories be applied to research areas in older periods?’
- ‘What about non-English speaking publications that were more relevant in previous decades?’
- ‘What about countries that changed their borders over time, like West and East Germany?’
These questions are hard to answer, but in this webinar our guest speakers from the Max Planck Institute talk through an alternative perspective and showcase their approach to these questions and indeed, their potential answers.
Using the Dimensions Analytics dataset, the team at the Max Planck Institute have developed an approach that allows for comparative historical analysis of research outputs of institutions or countries.
They lay open the biases and pitfalls they encountered on the way, finishing with a spark of hope to make progress.