Public procurement notice: Contract Award Notice
Published: 2022-03-04
Buyer: Universiteit Leiden
Country: NL
Contract type: Supplies
Procedure: Negotiated without a prior call for competition
CPV classification: 48610000: Database systems
Estimated value: 440000 EUR
Award criteria: Lowest price

Technical requirements: A bibliometric license agreement for Clarivate Analytics’ Science Citation Index, Social Science Citation Index, Arts & Humanities Citation index and Conference Proceedings Citation Index for the duration of one year.
The Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) studies scientific research and its connections to technology, innovation, and society. Our research, bibliometric, and evaluation expertise provide a solid basis for supporting research assessment and strategic decision making and for developing science policy.
CWTS builds its own citation index system to be used in bibliometric research and analyses. To this end, CWTS needs to acquire raw bibliographic data: title, abstract, authors, affiliations, source, year, volume, issue, page numbers, cited references, DOI, document type, subject categories, etc. The data needs to be provided in a computer processable format.
Furthermore, there are four aspects that should be taken into consideration when assessing if the dataset is fit for the purpose: coverage, comprehensive, unbiased, high quality and innovative. Particularly, the quality of the raw data for the address affiliation strings is unrivalled.
CWTS covers all scientific disciplines in both its basic research as well as in its contract research services. The Web of Science covers the sciences, social sciences, arts and humanities. Though the coverage varies from discipline to discipline, the Web of Science is multidisciplinary.
The Web of Science provides sources that run back to the 1980’s and cited references going back to 1900. This enables CWTS to conduct extensive longitudinal analyses. This is a prerequisite for research policy oriented studies.
Journals for the Web of Science are selected by an independent editorial team. The selection process is publisher neutral and applied consistently to all publishing partners. This generates an independent and unbiased dataset.
The field of research evaluation and bibliometric analyses is constantly evolving. This brings new demands in relation to the data source. Clarivate Analytics provides an innovative data solution product. Recent developments are the inclusion of early access publications, open access information, unified funding data, identification of withdrawn publications and connectivity to Google Scholar. Notably, one of the latest innovations is the introduction of a publication based classification system of science based on an algorithm developed by CWTS.
Furthermore, CWTS has put a huge effort in cleaning the raw data into a format that fits as good as possible the requirements for its research and services. The quality of these raw data is better than the raw data from other providers, e.g., the abstracts, document type and subject categories. If an alternative would exist, CWTS would need to make a comparable investment to get the data up to the level required.
Finally, the form of the agreement should enable CWTS to conduct commercial contract research work. Clarivate Analytics is able to provide a bibliometric license agreement for the data that supports both usage in fundamental research as well as commercial contract research studies. Furthermore, it authorizes CWTS to disseminate the results via the required channels: written reports, Leiden Ranking website, CWTS Monitor web-based reporting interface and visualizations via its VOSviewer- and CitNetExplorer software.
For these reasons, CWTS plans to obtain a bibliometric license agreement for Clarivate Analytics’ Science Citation Index, Social Science Citation Index, Arts & Humanities Citation index and Conference Proceedings Citation Index for the period of one year, with an option for one more consecutive year.


Winner: Clarivate Analytics LLC
Award value: 440000
Number of bids: 1