SIR 2011 : Croatia at the doorstep of Europe? I’m an emigrant for twenty six years, some 35% of my years, and I am getting used to the fact that Croatia is not my homeland anymore - but it is my motherland. And it hits me hard when I see data like SIR World Report 2011, data which evidence yet another affair that I was (I am?) fooled about my motherland. This time it is about the university I’ve graduated from and the scientific institution I’ve worked at for fifteen years.
Scimago Institutions Rankings (SIR) world reports are an evaluation framework of worldwide research institutions and organi- zations. The 2011 report, which covers 2005-09 period, uses six indicators to reveal main aspects of research size, perfor- mance, impact and international collaboration for 3,042 institutions that together are responsible for more than 80% of worldwide scientific output. Among the indicators, the Normalized Impact (NI) score seems to me as the most informative one on the quality of an institution because it minimizes the influence of institution size and profile. The values, expressed in percentages, relate institution's average scientific impact to the world average, which is 1, i.e. a score of 0.8 means the institution is cited 20% below average and 1.3 means the institution is cited 30% above average.
My alma mater has the NI of 0.7, my ‘alma pater’ 0.8. And those are the leading scientific institutions in Croatia. Need I say more?
WEBSITE EDITOR:
Krešimir J. Adamić
