Research diffusion and position in ranking scimago for Spanish universities

Abstract

The measurement and control of research activity in universities is increasingly more relevant and conditions its institutional image, as international proliferation of rankings proves it. The aim of this paper is to analyse the support actions that Spanish universities are offering to the scientific community to achieve research excellence, categorize them, and afterwards compare if there is a correlation between these internal services and the position of Spanish universities in the SIR ranking, which is based primarily on external results. This methodology is based on content analysis. The results obtained show some similarity, in spite of the discordant cases that allow us to conclude that the research activity responds to individual initiatives and finds synergies from collaborative work between different institutions. Also, public universities show higher levels of support to research, than private ones.