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The purpose of this paper is to apply and evaluate the bibliometric method Bradfordizing for information retrieval (IR) experiments. Bradfordizing is used for generating core document sets for subject-specific questions and to reorder result sets from distributed searches. The method will be applied and tested in a controlled scenario of scientific literature databases from social and political sciences, economics, psychology and medical science (SOLIS, SoLit, USB Köln Opac, CSA Sociological Abstracts, World Affairs Online, Psyndex and Medline) and 164 standardized topics. An evaluation of the method and its effects is carried out in two laboratory-based information retrieval experiments (CLEF and KoMoHe) using a controlled document corpus and human relevance assessments. The results show that Bradfordizing is a very robust method for re-ranking the main document types (journal articles and monographs) in today's digital libraries (DL). The IR tests show that relevance distributions after re-ranking improve at a significant level if articles in the core are compared with articles in the succeeding zones. The items in the core are significantly more often assessed as relevant, than items in zone 2 (z2) or zone 3 (z3). The improvements between the zones are statistically significant based on the Wilcoxon signed-rank test and the paired T-Test. (author's abstract)

This article contributes to two debates about international relations (IR) as a discipline: first, how global is IR, and how is it structured? Second, what is the state of theory in IR? We conducted (co-) citation analyses of both Web of Science (WoS) and—for the first time— non-WoS publications from Europe, North America, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. With regard to the first question, we find that global IR resembles a core–periphery structure as a "hub and spoke" system whereby transatlantic core nodes are interconnected to each other and to some periphery nodes, while the periphery nodes are connected to the core but not to each other. IR scholarship in the periphery quotes the transatlantic theory cluster but is not linked to each other, not even in the same region. Knowledge produced in the periphery has to go through the transatlantic core in order to be recognized globally. As to the transatlantic core, we identify two major (co-) citation clusters: one committed to IR theory-building across issue areas from a variety of perspectives and the other focused on security studies with a strong emphasis on quantitative methods. With regard to the second question, global IR hangs together through references to the IR theory cluster consisting of North American and European authors who appear to define what IR theory is. Scholars in the periphery refer to this transatlantic IR theory cluster when engaging in theory-building. IR theories have become rather diverse and pluralistic, even in the core. While scholars still refer to the big "isms," they use them around the globe in a synthesizing manner.

This paper asked two interrelated questions through citation analyses of both WoS- and – for the first time – seven non-WoS publications from Latin America, Africa, and Asia: 1) What is the state of IR theory in various journals? 2) To what extent is IR theory global rather than con-fined to transatlantic IR? We find that IR theory is alive and kicking everywhere. There is little evidence for continued paradigmatic warfare as experienced during the late 1980s and early 1990s. The two main clusters of the 300 top-cited sources represented in our WoS dataset are both engaged in theory-building, one with regard to one substantive issue-area in world poli-tics, namely international security, the other more generally devoted to theorizing from a variety of substantive perspectives. As to the non-WoS journals in our sample, a similar picture of non-paradigmatic theory use emerges. However, while IR theory is referred to everywhere, it is definitely not global. Our top-300 WoS cited sources have been exclusively published in the U.S., the UK, and (Western) Europe. Highly cited theory sources in our dataset of non-WoS journals do not contain references to non-Western IR scholarship either. There are few theory citations in non-WoS journals referring to scholars of the particular region or country, but these cites do not travel beyond the individual journal. In sum, we can observe a core-periphery structure of global IR whereby a strongly interconnected transatlantic core community faces a periphery that only connects through common references to the core.

Initiativen zur Schaffung eines "europäischen Forschungsraumes" bemühen sich seit einiger Zeit, ein Bündel von Indikatoren zur Identifikation europäischer wissenschaftlicher "Centers of Excellence" zu finden und in ein öffentliches Berichtssystem zu implementieren. In den Universitätsgesetzen einiger Bundesländer Deutschlands sind Regelungen aufgenommen worden, die zum Ziel haben, Hochschulen nach ihren "Leistungen in Forschung und Lehre" zu finanzieren. Auch die außeruniversitären Institute der Grundlagenforschung und der angewandten Forschung in Deutschland haben Evaluationen nach ihren "Leistungen in der Forschung" erfahren und zum Teil strittige Anpassungen vornehmen müssen. Wenn Vorhaben dieser Art einen Sinn haben sollen, dann muss man wissen, was man evaluieren will. Man muss weiterhin wissen, ob und wie man das, was man evaluieren will, messen kann. Und man muss zum dritten gute Gründe dafür haben, dass das, was man messen kann, auch ein zuverlässiger Indikator für das ist, was man messen will. Das erste Problem verweist auf ein Leitbild, das zweite auf das Problem der Operationalisierung, das dritte auf die Validität der benutzten Indikatoren. Über das wissenschaftlichen Institutionen angemessene Verfahren der Leistungsbewertung und über ihre Konsequenzen besteht derzeit kein allgemeiner Konsens. Gewinnung, Interpretation und Nutzung dieser Verfahren erfordern freilich Kompetenz und Expertise, um Fehldeutungen vorbeugen zukönnen. Untersuchungen über Prinzipien und Verfahren der Evaluation wissenschaftlicher Institutionen sind ein wichtiges Anliegen der Wissenschaftsforschung. Die Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftsforschung hat sich dieser Fragestellung angenommen und sie im Rahmen ihrer Jahrestagung am 28. und 29. März 2003 in der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin diskutiert. Die Beiträge dieses Jahrbuches sollen dazu beitragen, einen Einblick in die Problematik der Evaluation von Forschungsleistung im allgemeinen, aber auch in die Möglichkeiten und Grenzen der Beschreibung von Forschungs- und Lehrleistungen im Kontext wissenschaftlicher Institutionen zu geben.