University rankings and institutional affiliations: Role of academic librarians

Abstract

Croatian and international higher education institutions (HEIs) value university ranking lists as a method for evaluating the impact of higher education institutions. Different ranking lists utilize different calculation methods to position universities on a scale, thus giving said institutions lower or higher visibility in the academic environment. One of the criteria used to classify a particular university is the scientific output of its researchers. Data on research productivity are mainly collected from bibliographic and citation databases such as the Web of Science Core Collection (WOSCC) and Scopus. The accuracy of collected data depends, among other things, on the institutional affiliations that the authors list in their papers. The aim of this paper is to show that the correct listing of institutional affiliations in scientific articles indexed in the WOSCC and Scopus databases affects the number of papers attributed to the institution in question.This paper analyses the variants of institution names that are listed as affiliations of two faculties of the University of Split. The results show that, due to different name variants entered as institutional affiliations when searching for affiliations by category, a certain number of papers cannot be attributed either to the University of Split or to a particular faculty. This may have also had an impact on some faculties' positions within the University, as well as on their placement on ranking lists.The focus is on the role of academic librarians as professionals who are familiar with the organization of scholarly databases, as well as their institutions' scholarly output. They are often able to resolve the issue of missing author affiliations and missing links between faculty and university affiliations. Furthermore, recognition of the librarians' efforts and achievements in supporting the faculties positioning within the university, and the universities positioning nationally could benefit the status and the visibility of academic librarians within their communities.