Abstract
Evaluation systems have been long criticized for abusing and misusing bibliometric indicators. This has created a culture by which academics are constantly exposing their daily work to the standards they are expected to perform. In this study, we investigate whether researchers’ own values and expectations are in line with the expectations of the evaluation system. We conduct a multiple case study of five departments in two Dutch universities to examine how they balance between their own valuation regimes and the evaluation schemes. For this, we combine curriculum analysis with a series of semi-structured interviews. We propose a model to study the diversity of academic activities and apply it to the multiple case study to understand how such diversity is shaped by discipline and career stage. We conclude that the observed misalignment is not only resulting from an abuse of metrics but also by a lack of tools to evaluate performance in a contextualized and adaptable way.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 496-514 |
| Number of pages | 19 |
| Journal | Research Evaluation |
| Volume | 32 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2023 |
Funding
This work was supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement no 707404 and the COMPARE project (Ref: PID2020-117007RA-I00) granted by the Spanish Ministry of Science (Ref: AEI/10.13039/501100011033/). R.C. is partly supported by the South African DST-NRF Centre of Excellence in Scientometrics and Science, Technology and Innovation Policy (SciSTIP). N.R.-G. is currently supported by a Ramón y Cajal grant from the Spanish Ministry of Science (RYC2019-027886-I).Keywords
- academia
- evaluation culture
- research careers
- research evaluation
- scientometrics