Bauhaus University Weimar: New guideline for clear affiliation information!

Bauhaus University Weimar: New guideline for clear affiliation information!

Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Weimar, Deutschland - The Bauhaus University Weimar has a new Affiliation guideline March 2023 decided by the Presidium and officially published on April 23, 2025. This new guideline applies to all researchers and bindingly determines how the university is to be mentioned in scientific work. The aim is to ensure a uniform naming and make the publications of the university clearly recognizable in order to ensure a clear assignment in libraries, archives and databases.

Prof. Peter Benz, the President of the University, underlines the importance of this measure for the visibility of the researchers and thus legitimizes the strategic positioning of the university in national and international competition. The new guideline, which was developed in response to inconsistent or incomplete affiliation information, also meets the problem that the university in rankings and citation databases may not be recognized as such if only general terms such as "Weimar University" or only the faculty name are specified.

background and relevance of the affiliation information

The importance of the affiliation information is also underlined by the hrk in 2018. These recommendations are crucial for universities and research institutions because the assignment of authors to their institutions plays an important role in scientific competition. Univers schools and research institutions are often assessed based on their publication performance. Thus, a consistent and precise indication of the institutional belonging to the publication output of scientists and institutions is essential.

Different challenges, such as multiple affiliations due to joint calls or cross -institutional doctoral programs, make it necessary for universities to formulate clear guidelines for assigning research. These guidelines apply not only to scientific staff, but also to students, doctoral students and guest researchers. In the event of multiple affiliation, all adjacent facilities must be mentioned in publications, which increases the transparency and traceability of scientific research.

guidelines and standardized spellings

In order to further improve the visibility of the research services and the impact of publications, universities such as the University of Osnabrück have also adopted a guideline for the standardized indication of affiliation in scientific publications. This determines which spellings are to be used for specifying the institution and recommends using persistent identifiers such as orcid and institutional identifiers such as Ror. This significantly increases the findability of publications by search algorithms and automated procedures.

The impulse for the new affiliation guideline at the Bauhaus University came from Kevin Lang, employee of the research data management department. Lang developed the guideline based on its own scientific examination, the results of which were published in the open access journal O-Bib. The comprehensive concept aims to promote the visibility of the researchers and ensure that the university's contributions are not lost in the masses in the global research landscape.