On the morning of April 15, 2019, Nees Jan van Eck, a senior researcher at Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) of Leiden University in the Netherlands, and internationally renowned knowledge map expert, visited our school and presented two lectures entitled with "A Scientometrics Perspective on University Ranking" and "Large-scale Visualization of Science". The lectures were hosted by Professor Lin Zhang of our school.

The first lecture's topic was "A Scientometrics Perspective on University Ranking". Researcher Van Eck introduced the university ranking project of Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) of Leiden University in the Netherlands at the beginning. The introduction included the aspects of university selection, indicators construction and methods of application, and he pointed out the differences between the university ranking of his institution and others'. He also illustrated in details of some key issues of evaluation projects, such as why higher cited publications are necessary, why fractional counting is used, and how to solve issues of co-authoring by multi-institution, and etc.

Nees emphasized the responsible use of university rankings, he gave a comprehensive and objective interpretation of different stages of university rankings from initial assumptions and the selection of indicators and methods to the correct understanding and application of university rankings. Scientific evaluation needs to be supported by comprehensive and objective data sources, which are the important basis for scientific evaluation. Nees believed that the scientific evaluation of a university is not simply made up by some general indicators. It must be made with a rigorous and scientific attitude so that the most reasonable and fair evaluation system can be built up.

Nees' second lecture explained how to make large-scale visualization of science from an application perspective. He mainly introduced the visualization implementation tools, namely VOSviewer and CitNetExplorer these two visualization software, and network analysis skills and algorithm-based scientific classification system. Subsequently, Professor Lin Zhang and other researchers discussed application details of the technology with Researcher Van Eck.

Nees Jan van Eck is a senior researcher at Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) of Leiden University in the Netherlands, internationally renowned knowledge map expert, editorial board member of Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, Journal of Data and Information Science and Quantitative Science Studies, board member of International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics (ISSI). Nees Jan van Eck is mainly engaged in the fields of scientometrics and bibliometrics. He has published more than 50 papers in international authoritative journals with an H index of 37. Nees Jan van Eck has constantly committed to scientometric analysis and algorithm development, he is a primary developer of visualization software VOSviewer and CitNetExplorer, and VOSviewer has been used in the research of more than 1,000 international publications.

  Contributed by: Fan Qi, Yuan Yu

Journal Center, School of Information Management