Five years ago, we welcomed you to Leiden Madtrics through our first blog post. With the new blog, we wished to establish an active and engaging platform for our institute and our field to express ourselves – other than through scientific publications. We hoped that Leiden Madtrics would "[serve] as a way to inspire and educate about topics such as the (mis)use of research metrics, indicators, and rankings in academia". We have certainly written plenty on these subjects, but arguably our scope (and the scope of CWTS, our institute) has broadened over time.

A lot has happened and changed between 2019 and now, in our institute, our field, the academic world at large, and the world in general. We hope that we managed to capture some of that through our lens on this platform. To provide an overview of the scope of our blog posts, we created a VOSviewer map which maps the titles and contents of all 166 blog posts that we have published since the start. You can also take a look at the VOSviewer online version of the map.

We can see different strands of research in our field and at our institute represented by the red and the green clusters, roughly mapping to the three focal areas of Engagement & Inclusion, Evaluation & Culture (both red) and Information & Openness (green). A special mention goes to the pandemic-related yellow cluster at the top.

It has been our pleasure to work on this blog for the past 5 years and we would like to thank everyone who has been part of the blog team at any point: Juan Pablo Bascur, Josephine Bergmans, Carole de Bordes, Tung Tung Chan, Jonathan Dudek, Karin den Dulk, Jeroen van Honk, Wouter van de Klippe, Anouk Spelt, Henri de Winter, and Zohreh Zahedi. But of course, another group of contributors has been just as important: our many authors! We would like to thank them for all the great contributions made over the years!

Finally, to you, our readers: thanks for your continued interest! If you don't want to miss out on future blog posts, subscribe to our newsletter to receive email notifications. Additionally (or alternatively), follow us on your favourite social media: LinkedIn, Mastodon, or X.

Header image: Steven Van Elk on Unsplash