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This article addresses the robustness of country-by-country rankings according to the number of published articles and their average citation impact in the field oncology. It compares rankings based on bibliometric indicators derived from the Web of Science (WoS) with those calculated from Scopus. It is found that the oncological journals in Scopus not covered by WoS tend to be nationally oriented journals, i.e. they mainly serve a national research community, and play as of yet a more peripheral role in the international journal communication system. In expanding the set of WoS journals with Scopus journals not indexed for WoS, the countries that profit most in terms of percentage of published documents tend to show a decline in their average citation rate. This paradoxical finding is further explained by mathematical-statistical considerations, and interpreted as a short term effect. The paper discusses its implications for the construction of bibliometric indicators.

A bibliometric analysis of the 50 most frequently publishing Spanish universities shows large differences in the publication activity and citation impact among research disciplines within an institution. Gini Index is a useful measure of an institution's disciplinary specialization and can roughly categorize universities in terms of general versus specialized. A study of the Spanish academic system reveals that assessment of a university's research performance must take into account the disciplinary breadth of its publication activity and citation impact. It proposes the use of graphs showing not only a university's article production and citation impact, but also its disciplinary specialization. Such graphs constitute both a warning and a remedy against one-dimensional approaches to the assessment of institutional research performance.

An exploratory-descriptive analysis is presented of the national orientation of scientific-scholarly