Exploration of reproducibility issues in scientometric research

In scientometrics, we have not yet had an intensive debate about the reproducibility of research published in our field, although concerns about a lack of reproducibility have occasionally surfaced (see e.g. Glänzel & Schöpflin 1994 and Van den Besselaar et al. 2017), and the need to improve the reproducibility is used as an important argument for open citation data (see www.issi-society.org/open-citations-letter/). We initiated a first discussion about reproducibility in scientometrics with a workshop at ISSI 2017 in Wuhan. One of the outcomes was the sense that scientific fields differ with regard to the type and pervasiveness of threats to the reproducibility of their published research, last but not least due to their differences in modes of knowledge production, such as confirmatory versus exploratory study designs, and differences in methods and empirical objects.