Paul Wouters

Programme leader at the Virtual Knowledge Studio for the Humanities and Social Sciences, an institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences

Paul Wouters (1951) is programme leader of the Virtual Knowledge Studio for the Humanities and Social Sciences, an institute of the KNAW, and Visiting Professor of Cybermetrics at the University of Wolverhampton, UK. He is also scientific director of the Erasmus Studio and holds a chair in Knowledge Dynamics at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

Paul Wouters is particularly interested in the design and analysis of new scholarly practices in the humanities and social sciences. Can we create novel forms of knowledge by making smarter use of information and information technologies, and how has this interaction occurred in the past? Paul has written about the history of the Science Citation Index and its impact on the standards of quality in academic work. Presently, his work focuses on e-research in the humanities and social sciences.

Wouters was coordinator of the Dutch Graduate School Wetenschap, Technologie en Moderne Cultuur together with Annemiek Nelis from 2001 until 2005. He has lectured at the University of Amsterdam from 1991 onwards. For over two decades, Paul Wouters worked as (science) journalist for a variety of newspapers and journals. His website Research Dreams draws on this range of experiences of doing, teaching, leading and communicating about research.