Mapping Academic Institutions According to Their Journal Publication Profile: Spanish Universities as a Case Study

摘要

We introduce a novel methodology for mapping academic institutions based ontheir journal publication profiles. We believe that journals in whichresearchers from academic institutions publish their works can be considered asuseful identifiers for representing the relationships between theseinstitutions and establishing comparisons. However, when academic journals areused for research output representation, distinctions must be introducedbetween them, based on their value as institution descriptors. This leads us tothe use of journal weights attached to the institution identifiers. Since ajournal in which researchers from a large proportion of institutions publishedtheir papers may be a bad indicator of similarity between two academicinstitutions, it seems reasonable to weight it in accordance with howfrequently researchers from different institutions published their papers inthis journal. Cluster analysis can then be applied to group the academicinstitutions, and dendrograms can be provided to illustrate groups ofinstitutions following agglomerative hierarchical clustering. In order to testthis methodology, we use a sample of Spanish universities as a case study. Wefirst map the study sample according to an institution's overall researchoutput, then we use it for two scientific fields (Information and CommunicationTechnologies, as well as Medicine and Pharmacology) as a means to demonstratehow our methodology can be applied, not only for analyzing institutions as awhole, but also in different disciplinary contexts.