Science System Assessment

I work for the Rathenau Institute, a Dutch public research organisation that is part of the Royal Academy of Sciences. The Rathenau Institute has two departments. Technology Assessment (TA) studies the effects of and issues surrounding new technologies. Think, for example, of the ethical questions involved in genetic modification or stem cell research or the threats to privacy of RFID. Science System Assessment (SciSA) studies the dynamics of the science system in all its dimensions. This includes the decisions and incentives of individual scientists (e.g. when do they collaborate or work on interdisciplinary topics?), the performance of research groups (e.g. what factors determine a group's performance?), the development of scientific fields (e.g. analysing bibliometric data on scientific publishing to see where new interdisciplinary specialisation arise, where scientists acquire their knowledge, and who works with whom), the functioning of organisations in the science system (e.g. what factors determine which research proposals receive funding?), and the performance of the science system as a whole.

Projects

My work is divided into a number of projects. I will post short pieces on this page as I progress.

• LargeScaleResearchFacilities
• EnhancedScience

Key links

I used to store all my links under favourites. But after losing them for the umpteenth time, I decided to use another method. At first, I stored them in an html-document on a local disk, but maintaining that is a lot of work. A wiki makes a lot more sense.

• StatisticsSources
• ScienceTechnology
• EconomicsSources
• InformationCommunicationTechnology
• SourcesMethods

Economic History

Once upon a time I was a macroeconomic quantitative historian, specialised in the construction and analysis of historical national accounts. My benchmark project was the National Accounts of the Netherlands, 1800-1913, a project set up and run by Jan Luiten van Zanden. The main product of our project was Jan-Pieter Smits, Edwin Horlings and Jan Luiten van Zanden, Dutch GNP and its Components, 1800-1913 (Groningen Growth and Development Centre 2000), which is still my most cited work.

Shortcuts

Rathenau

Gmail

Eurostat

Statline

Overheid.nl

EurLex

TED

SSRN

OECD

Wikipedia

Current traffic information for the Netherlands

CNN

NRC Handelsblad

NOS News

My Personal Preferences

• Show tool-tip topic info on mouse-over of WikiWord links, on or off:
  • #Set LINKTOOLTIPINFO = off
• ChangePassword for changing your password
• ChangeEmailAddress for changing your email address
• TWikiUsers has a list of other TWiki users
• UserDocumentationCategory is a list of TWiki user documentation
• UserToolsCategory lists all TWiki user tools

Links

• ATasteOfTWiki - view a short introductory presentation on TWiki for beginners
• WelcomeGuest - starting points on TWiki
• TWikiUsersGuide - complete TWiki documentation, Quick Start to Reference
• Sandbox - try out TWiki on your own
• EdwinHorlingsSandbox - just for me