The European Summer School for Scientometrics (ESSS) 2018

I was very fortunate to attend the European Summer School for Scientometrics in Vienna, Austria from 23-28 July 2018.  This was the 9^th summer school of its kind and was attended by 51 participants from 22 countries. 

It was a privilege to learn from people, whom I respect, because of their work in scientometrics, for example Henk Moed, the inventor of the SNIP (Source-Normalized Impact per Paper) metric .  Some of them represented the major scientometric centra in Europe.  I enjoyed speaking to the other participants and was pleasantly surprised to learn that most of them were also librarians. It was interesting to hear how they applied scientometrics at their institutions.

The program included an historical overview of bibliometrics, bibliometrics data and the cleaning thereof, subject classification, searching techniques, the use of bibliometrics in policies, open access and altmetrics.  I learned that none of these metrics were perfect and always needed to be used in conjunction with other measurements.  Not everything is measurable and therefore the metrics should be used together with a narrative.