Benchmarking research performance at the University. Level with information theoretic measures García, J. A. Rodríguez Sánchez, Rosa María Fernández Valdivia, Joaquín Robinson García, Nicolás Torres Salinas, Daniel Information gain Institution-institution similarity Impact factor Information theoretic measure Information conservation constraint Benchmarking research output Universities Bibliometric indicators Research evaluation Research Policy Higher Education Spain This paper presents a new method for comparing universities based on information theoretic measures. The research output of each academic institution is represented statistically by an impact-factor histogram. To this aim, for each academic institution we compute the probability of occurrence of a publication with impact factor in different intervals. Assuming the probabilities associated with a pair of academic institutions our objective is to measure the Information Gain between them. To do so, we develop an axiomatic characterization of relative information for predicting institution-institution dissimilarity. We use the Spanish university system as our scenario to test the proposed methodology for benchmarking three universities with the rest as a case study. For each case we use different scientific fields such as Information and Communication Technologies, Medicine & Pharmacy, and Economics & Business as we believe comparisons must take into account their disciplinary context. Finally we validate the Information Gain values obtained for each case with previous studies. 2012-10-08T09:25:16Z 2012-10-08T09:25:16Z 2012-10-08 info:eu-repo/semantics/article 0138-9130 http://hdl.handle.net/10481/21993 eng Scientometrics http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License