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An International Bibliometric Comparison of Research Conducted by the Czech Academy of Sciences

The study compares the scientific performance of basic research conducted by the Czech Academy of Sciences (CAS) with that of comparable networks of non-university research organisations in Germany and France. The analysis compares research fields in terms of their staff size, publication output, and publication productivity in top scientific journals. The comparison is based on an accompanying publicly available interactive online application.

The whole study is available in Czech here.

Summary 

• This study presents key bibliometric comparisons of staff size, publication output, and publication productivity of the institutes of the Czech Academy of Sciences (CAS) as a whole.
• We compare CAS with similar networks of non-university research institutions in Germany—the Helmholtz-Gemeinschaft Deutscher Forschungszentren, Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der angewandten Forschung, Leibniz-Gemeinschaft, Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften (HFLP)—and with the French network Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS). The comparisons in this work are based on a publicly available interactive online application, which provides much more detailed information.
• The staff size of the CAS is similar to that of HFLP and CNRS, not only in absolute terms (the number of researchers relative to the populations of the countries), but also in terms of their share of their entire domestic research sectors, after we take multiple affiliations of authors into account.
• Compared to researchers at CNRS and HFLP, when we account for joint affiliations with universities, researchers at the CAS are similarly productive in top journals: they are slightly more productive than CNRS researchers, and somewhat less productive than HFLP researchers, but demonstrate significantly greater disciplinary heterogeneity. The disciplines at CAS that are relatively large in terms of personnel tend to be less productive in terms of publications.
• In comparison with the domestic research sectors (predominantly that of domestic universities), the CAS institutes are similarly over-productive in top journals, as are HFLP and CNRS institutes in relation to their domestic universities. After we adjust for overlapping affiliations, CAS institutes are relatively more productive than CNRS and HFLP in this respect.