Academics reporting to be simultaneously affiliated with multiple organisations is a growing global phenomenon with significant implications for the usefulness and accuracy of research evaluations. Reporting on findings from a new study, Hanna Hottenro…
Category: research assessment
The global rise in academic authors reporting multiple institutional affiliations reflects the unanticipated influence of research assessment on academia.
Academics reporting to be simultaneously affiliated with multiple organisations is a growing global phenomenon with significant implications for the usefulness and accuracy of research evaluations. Reporting on findings from a new study, Hanna Hottenro…
The global rise in academic authors reporting multiple institutional affiliations reflects the unanticipated influence of research assessment on academia.
Academics reporting to be simultaneously affiliated with multiple organisations is a growing global phenomenon with significant implications for the usefulness and accuracy of research evaluations. Reporting on findings from a new study, Hanna Hottenro…
For the sake of all involved, we should stop the REF clock
Emily Yarrow and Julie Davies argue any benefits of the current March 31st submission date for REF2021 should not outweigh the human costs to the academics and staff currently working to achieve this deadline. The UK is in the midst of the worst health and financial crises for several generations and the REF deadline of … Continued
Four guiding principles for choosing frameworks and indicators to assess research impact
Selecting a framework for assessing research impact can be difficult, especially for interdisciplinary studies and research in fields that do not have established forms impact assessment. In this post, Elena Louder, Carina Wyborn, Christopher Cvitanovic, Angela T. Bednarek, outline four principles for researchers designing impact assessment criteria for their work and suggest how a closer … Continued
For China’s ambitious research reforms to be successful, they will need to be supported by new research assessment infrastructures
The Chinese government recently announced that research assessment in China should no longer be predominantly focused on metrics, Web of Science based indicators and what has become known as ‘SCI worship’. In this post Lin Zhang and Gunnar Sivertsen discuss how China’s new research policy might be implemented and the parallels it has to recent attempts to reform … Continued
To ensure the quality of peer reviewed research introduce randomness
Journals play an important role in signalling the quality of academic research. This quality is often linked to measures such as the journal impact factor. However, these measures often obscure the overall quality of research papers in a journal. In this post, Margit Osterloh and Bruno Frey argue that the overall quality and originality of … Continued
Generating impact in the absence of government: Northern Ireland’s unlevel playing field
Impact assessment regimes are largely a-spatial, in that they assume that the academics they assess have equal access and opportunities to influence at different scales, local, regional, national, international etc, regardless of where they are located. Taking the example of Northern Ireland, Dr Vanessa Gstrein and Maria Prince explore how the lack of a functioning … Continued
2019 In Review: Metrics and research assessment
As governments increasingly look to national research systems as important inputs into the ‘knowledge economy’, developing ways to assess and understand their performance has become focus for policy and critique. This post brings together some of the top posts on research metrics and assessment that appeared on the LSE Impact Blog in 2019. Working to the rule – How bibliometric […]
Working to the rule – How bibliometric targets distorted Italian research
As Goodhart’s law states: ‘when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure’. Using bibliometrics to measure and assess researchers has become increasingly common, but does implementing these policies therefore devalue the metrics they are based on? In this post Alberto Baccini, Giuseppe De Nicolao and Eugenio Petrovich, present evidence from a study of Italian researchers […]