The role of editorial material in bibliometric research performance assessments

In this study, the possibilities to extend the basis for research performance exercises with editorial material are explored. While this document type has been traditionally not considered as an important type of scientific communication in research performance assessment procedures, there is a perception from researchers that editorial materials should be considered as relevant document types as important sources for the dissemination of scientific knowledge. In a number of these cases, some of the mentioned editorial materials are actually ‘highly cited’. This lead to a thorough scrutiny of editorials or editorial material over the period 1992–2001, for all citation indexes of Thomson Scientific. The relevance of editorial materials through three quantitative bibliometric characteristics of scientific publications, namely page length, number of references, and the number of received citations, are thoroughly analyzed.