This article reports on methodological approaches to evaluate the relevance and quality of educational research publications. In the first section it focuses on the ISI Social Science Citation Index and shows that this standard instrument for bibliometric measurement is insufficient for the representation of European educational research. In the following sections, alternative approaches are delineated in order to constitute the proposal of a multi-attributive setting for a new observation and evaluation instrument for social science academic publications. The final section outlines a project proposal submitted to the 7th Framework Programme of the European Union, supported by the European Educational Research Association (EERA). (Contains 8 notes.)