Affiliations: GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Computational Social Science, Unter Sachsenhausen 6-8, 50667 Cologne, Germany. Tel.: +49 221 47694 235; Fax: +49 221 47694 199; E-mail: Sabrina.petersohn@gesis.org
Abstract: Quantitative metrics in research assessment are proliferating all over the
world. The demand has led to an increase in bibliometric practitioners and
service providers. Their professional roles and competencies have not yet
been subject to systematic study. This paper focuses on one important
service provider in evaluative bibliometrics - academic librarians - and
analyzes their professional competencies from a sociology of professions
perspective. To this end, expert interviews with 25 British and German
information professionals and several documents have been analyzed
qualitatively. Academic librarians compete with other occupations for
professional jurisdiction in quantitative research assessment. The main
currency in this competition is their expert knowledge. Our results show
that academic librarians rely strongly on the know-how gained in their
academic Library and Information Science (LIS) training and develop a
specific jurisdictional claim towards research assessment, consisting
primarily in training, informing and empowering users to proficiently manage
the task of evaluating scientific quality themselves. Based on these
findings, and informed by the theoretical framework of Andrew Abbott, our
conceptual proposal is to adapt formal training in bibliometrics to the
various specific professional approaches prevalent in the jurisdictional
competition surrounding quantitative research assessment.
Keywords: Professional jurisdiction, evaluative bibliometrics, academic libraries, Andrew Abbott, sociology of professions, academic knowledge base, professional knowledge base, bibliometrics education, claiming vacant jurisdiction
