Evaluating the scientific performance of researchers at the field of EU agencification from a bibliometric approach

Abstract

The paper aims to provide an overview on the field of European Union agencification, a later trend characterizing EU’s policy agenda and functioning to a significant extent. EU agencies are responsible for a wide range of policies and an unavoidable element when testing EU’s legitimacy. In the paper, the research field of EU agencification is analyzed from a bibliometric aspect quantifying the academic production, identifying the main publication and network patterns of authors, and defining the leading research directions by keyword analysis. Bibliometric metadata was collected from the Scopus international citation database, collecting the research output of 14 researchers participating in the TARN project (The Academic Research Network on Agencification of EU Executive Governance). The TARN projec is an international research collaboration specially designed to study EU agencification process. Data was imported and analyzed using the software VOSViewer and Gephi. In total, 437 records were found. The findings indicated that the researchers participating in the TARN projects are the researc group leaders, primarily coming from Western European countries. We found that the co-authorship network contains 13 communities and having the density of 0.787, while the co-citation network consists of 4 communities with a density of 0.39. Findings, implications, and suggestions for future research are presented.