Measuring the Research Capacity of a University : Use of Web of Science and Scopus

This paper discusses the possibilities and limitations of the use of publication databases such as Web of Science and Scopus to determine the research capabilities and prospective areas of research and development of universities. It also analyses major problems related with the analysis of universities’ publication activities in Scopus and Web of Science databases such as author surname variations, identification of author profile among authors with the same surname, author and organization profile merging, identification of author affiliation etc. This paper proposes a list of bibliometric indicators for the analysis of publication activities of individual researchers, university departments and universities as a whole. Furthermore, it describes the methodological approaches for interpreting these indicators. Finally, the paper reviews the possibilities of VOSviewer software for analysis of different aspect of publication activities at individual and department level such as international collaboration networks, detection of the hot topics of research activity and co-citation networks