  We introduce a novel methodology for mapping academic institutions based on
their journal publication profiles. We believe that journals in which
researchers from academic institutions publish their works can be considered as
useful identifiers for representing the relationships between these
institutions and establishing comparisons. However, when academic journals are
used for research output representation, distinctions must be introduced
between them, based on their value as institution descriptors. This leads us to
the use of journal weights attached to the institution identifiers. Since a
journal in which researchers from a large proportion of institutions published
their papers may be a bad indicator of similarity between two academic
institutions, it seems reasonable to weight it in accordance with how
frequently researchers from different institutions published their papers in
this journal. Cluster analysis can then be applied to group the academic
institutions, and dendrograms can be provided to illustrate groups of
institutions following agglomerative hierarchical clustering. In order to test
this methodology, we use a sample of Spanish universities as a case study. We
first map the study sample according to an institution's overall research
output, then we use it for two scientific fields (Information and Communication
Technologies, as well as Medicine and Pharmacology) as a means to demonstrate
how our methodology can be applied, not only for analyzing institutions as a
whole, but also in different disciplinary contexts.

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