Science and academia are complex systems with many agents at different levels.
At the micro-level, individuals pursue research and hold academic positions.
At the mesa-level, these individuals form collaboration teams, departments and
universities and pursue goals together. At the macro-level, the universities are
linked together by global communication and collaborations. This complexity
makes quantification and evaluation of these structures difficult. How are
different universities linked together? How are different fields of science
connected? Which individuals push the boundaries of science further? How
should funding agencies allocate funding across this vast system? The field
of scientometrics tries to answer such questions using quantitative, large-scale
methods (Leydesdorff, 2001, Leydesdorff & Milojevi¿c, 2015). Increase in
computation power and the rising availability of accessible databases of scientific
information has made such an approach possible.