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In recent decades, the emergence of new information and communication technologies has broadened the remit of bibliometric analysis. Bibliometrics are now used not only to assess products of scholarly communication such as articles or monographs, but to examine technology-related content such as web portals, repositories of technical publications or documents in social networks, which are studied with the help of web analytics and altmetrics. This paper examines the implications of this trend for the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa), whose criteria for assessing institutional performance have been extended in recent years to include the number of citations of scientijc articles and downloads of the technical publications made available at the corporation's web portal. As the paper shows, Embrapa's 42 research centres do not all follow the same pattern in the production of scientijc articles and citations, on the one hand, and of technical documents on the other (measured by downloads of manuals, bulletins and other publications). For this reason, Embrapa is beginning to tailor its system of performance assessment to the particularities of each centre, whether these involve the way the centre produces knowledge and technology or how it channels scholarly communication. The paper concludes that the development of suitable bibliometric indicators for managing centres dedicated to research and education requires a broad view of the centres themselves and can take on board such varied factors as institutional agreements, information Vows and the ways in which science and society inVuence each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]