Identification and study of research teams through bibliometric indicators

Abstract

A methodology based on coauthorship analysis is shown for the identifícation of research teams in a given discipline or research centre. The method includes using in-house programs to analyse a collection of documents downloaded from the Science Citation Index database. Three basic stages can be distinguished in the process: retrieval, downloading and normalisation of bibliographic data, construction of the author productivity file, and delimitation of research teams through coauthorship analysis. As a final step, teams are characterised by means of bibliometric indicators: team size, production, productivity, collaboration rate and subject specialisation of groups. The Spanish production in both a discipline and a research centre, over the years 1990-1993, is analysed through the methodology to test its performance and main results.