Meeting the Micro-Level Challenges: Bibliometrics at the Individual Level

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate a method for bibliometric evaluation of individuals, i.e. research staff currently employed within a university department or other knowledge organisations with research purposes. Based on methods for citation analysis and methods for clustering of papers into research lines ( using bibliographic coupling) we present an analysis of one researcher in three dimensions: 1) publication and citation indicators; 2) publication profile, and 3) research lines. One of the features of the method is the benchmark against other researchers within the same research line, i.e. researchers that use the same references and, accordingly, are active in the same field of research. The paper suggests this method as a means to avoid the fallacies of evaluation solely dependent on sub-field categories in the Web of Science in advanced citation analysis. The method was used in a Research Assessment Exercise accomplished in the autumn of 2008 at Royal Institute of Technology.