Toward an objective, reliable and accurate method for measuring research leadership

We compare a new method for measuring research leadership with the traditional method. Both methods are objective and reliable, utilize standard citation databases, and are easily replicated. The traditional method uses partitions of science based on journal categories, and has been extensively used to measure national leadership patterns in science, including those appearing in the NSF Science & Engineering Indicators Reports and in prominent journals such as Science and Nature. Our new method is based on co-citation techniques at the paper level. It was developed with the specific intent of measuring research leadership at a university, and was then extended to examine national patterns of research leadership. A comparison of these two methods provides compelling evidence that the traditional method grossly underestimates research leadership in most countries. The new method more accurately portrays the actual patterns of research leadership at the national level.