In February 2008 the Federal Government passed its strategy for the internationalization of research and development (“Strategie zur Internationalisierung von Wissenschaft und Forschung”). One of the initiative’s aims is to monitor and initiate research collaborations with the “best in the world”. In this pilot project the basics for a bibliometric monitoring instrument were developed. The instrument provides information about potential cooperationpartners to the Federal Ministry for Education and Research and its specialist departments to support decision making. It allows to identify potential cooperation partners on the levels of countries, organizations, and scientists within delineated subject.

The monitoring instrument was exemplarily developed for the subject fields Future Internet, Biotechnology 2020+,and Bioeconomics but can ultimately be applied in any field. It basically consists of methods for a search terms based delineation of fields and an indicator set to measure the quantity and quality of scientific research with a special focus on cooperation aspects. Already existing cooperation activities of German actors are identified using co-authorship analysis.

Since field delineation in bibliometrics has been regarded as methodologically difficult, an accompanying project called “Subject Delineation and Collaboration” deals with the development of an improved approach for the delineation of complex subject fields.