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This paper presents a simple model of the lifecycle of scientific ideas that points to changes in scientist incentives as the cause of scientific stagnation. It explores ways to broaden how scientific productivity is measured and rewarded, involving both academic search engines such as Google Scholar measuring which contributions explore newer ideas and university administrators and funding agencies utilizing these new metrics in research evaluation.
The Health Research Council of New Zealand is the first major government funding agency to use a lottery to allocate research funding for their Explorer Grant scheme. A recent survey examines how well the measure is accepted.
Research is a highly competitive profession where evaluation plays a central role. Yet such evaluations are often done in inappropriate ways that are damaging to individual careers, and to the profession.
Evaluation reforms will go round in circles without conceptual clarity, warns Anna Hatch.
Growing evidence suggests that the evaluation of researchers’ careers on the basis of narrow definitions of excellence is restricting diversity in academia, both in the development of its labour force and its approaches to address societal challenges. Recommendations are suggested for the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions.
A growing number of research agencies are assigning money randomly. The Swiss National Science Foundation is the latest funder to experiment with random selection.
A recent study finds a strong correlation between university revenues and their volume of publications and (field-normalized) citations. These results demonstrate empirically that international rankings are by and large richness measures and, therefore, can be interpreted only by introducing a measure of resources.
This article outlines the four principles that give shape to a new, less standardised approach to research assessment called "evaluative inquiry": employing versatile methods; shifting the contextual focus away from the individual; knowledge diplomacy; and favouring ongoing engagement ahead of open-and-shut reporting.
Opinion piece examining a study that found that the correlation between student evaluations and quality of learning is negative.
The rhetoric of "excellence" is pervasive across the academy. It is used to refer to research outputs as well as researchers, theory and education, individuals and organizations, from art history to zoology. But does "excellence" actually mean anything?
The primary goal of research is to advance knowledge. For that knowledge to benefit research and society, it must be trustworthy. Trustworthy research is robust, rigorous and transparent at all stages of design, execution and reporting. The authors developed the Hong Kong Principles (HKP) with a specific focus on the need to drive research improvement through ensuring that researchers are explicitly recognized and rewarded for behavior that leads to trustworthy research.
Many researchers still see the journal impact factor (JIF) as a key metric for promotions and tenure, despite concerns that it’s a flawed measure of a researcher’s value.
The switch to double-blind peer review will affect roughly 650 scientists working on projects worth an estimated US$55 million.
A Dutch conference discussed the current rewards and incentives system and thought about the evaluation criteria of the future.
At Elsevier's International Center for the Study of Research, experts will examine research using metrics and other qualitative and quantitative methods.
Why colleges and universities that claim to take teaching seriously need a comprehensive and fair system of evaluating it.
It is well established that administrators and decision-makers use journal prestige and impact factors as a shortcut to assess research. But it is not enough to recognize the problem. Identifying specific approaches that publishers can take to address these concerns really is key.
Grant reviewers favour 'broad' words used more often by men, but proposals using those terms don't produce better research.
Blinded review is an increasingly popular approach to reducing bias and increasing diversity in the selection of people and projects. We explore the impact of blinded review on gender inclusion in research grant proposals submitted to the Gates Foundation from 2008-2017. Despite blinded review, female applicants receive significantly lower scores.
Can word patterns from grant abstracts predict National Science Foundation (NSF) funding? The data describe a clear relationship between word patterns and funding magnitude: Grant abstracts that are longer than the average abstract, contain fewer common words, and are written with more verbal certainty receive more money.
A workshop run by DORA identified a number of ways to reduce bias in hiring and funding decisions.
The authors of the preprint "Use of the Journal Impact Factor in academic review, promotion, and tenure evaluations" discuss their investigation and their findings on how the flawed metric is currently used in tenure and promotion decisions in universities across North America.
Survey finds that 40% of research-intensive universities mention the controversial metric in review documents - despite efforts to dampen its influence.
The Journal Impact Factor (JIF) was originally designed to aid libraries in deciding which journals to index and purchase for their collections. Over the past few decades, however, it has become a relied upon metric used to evaluate research articles based on journal rank. Surveyed faculty often report feeling pressure to publish in journals with high JIFs and mention reliance on the JIF as one problem with current academic evaluation systems.
By forming a pool of funding applicants who have minimal qualification levels and then selecting randomly within that pool, funding agencies could avoid biases, disagreement and other limitations of peer review.
Paper provides new evidence on gender bias in teaching evaluations. Despite the fact that neither students’ grades nor self-study hours are affected by the instructor’s gender, it was found that women receive systematically lower teaching evaluations than their male colleagues.
Der Nationalfonds ist der wichtigste Förderer hiesiger Forschung.
The 2010 reform of the Italian university system introduced the National Scientific Habilitation (ASN) as a requirement for applying to permanent professor positions. Since the CVs of the 59149 candidates and the results of their assessments have been made publicly available, the ASN constitutes an opportunity to perform analyses about a nation-wide evaluation process.
