The Use of Bibliometrics to Measure Research Performance in Education Sciences

This paper investigates the fitness-for-purpose and soundness of bibliometric parameters for measuring and elucidating the
research performance of individual researchers in the field of education sciences in Switzerland. In order to take into account
the specificities of publication practices of researchers in education sciences, the analyses are based on two separate databases:
Web of Science and Google Scholar. Both databases show a very unequal distribution of the individual research output, and
the indicators used to measure research performance (quantity of publications and citation impact) from the two data sources
are highly positively correlated. However, individual characteristics of the researchers, such as age, gender and academic
position, that serve to explain the great variance in research performance, can only be identified if the Web of Science is
used as a benchmark of research performance. The results indicate that Google Scholar is so inclusive that it impedes a meaningful
interpretation of the data. However, the Web of Science inclusion policy for journals is also associated with certain shortcomings
that put some researchers at an unjustified disadvantage. Therefore, problems currently exist in regard to both citation databases
when used to benchmark individual research performance.