On the possibilities of presenting the research performance of an institute over a long period of time: the case of the Institute of Information Science at the University of Graz in Austria

In this paper, we demonstrate how the research performance of a university institute (department) over a long period of time can be presented and evaluated. Using the example of an information science institute at a German-speaking university, namely the (former) Institute of Information Science at the University of Graz in Austria, we present the research performance of this institute over the entire duration of its existence (33 years) in different ways. In order to be able to contextualize its performance, we compare it with that of some related institutions from all over the world. Due to the high effort involved in collecting data and the lack of data availability, the comparison must be limited to a period of a few years and—with regard to the institutions from non-German-speaking countries—to the Web of Science as data source. In this international comparison, the institute in the focus of the study shows relatively poor results. As can be seen, the choice of the data source has a major influence on the evaluation results. Especially for institutes from non-English-speaking countries with publications in their respective national languages, an exclusive use of international databases, such as Web of Science or Scopus, cannot fully consider the whole research performance. The use of personal publication lists or local research databases seems almost indispensable in these cases. A major novelty of this article is the handling of a very long evaluation period and the discussion of different ways of subdividing it. With regard to the presentation of the results, in the case of a long observation period, not only should annual and overall results be presented, but also multi-year comparisons be performed. In this way, year-by-year fluctuations can be smoothed out, and longer-term developments can be well represented.