Valuation regimes in academia: Researchers’ attitudes towards their diversity of activities and academic performance

Nicolas Robinson-Garcia; Rodrigo Costas; Gabriela F. Nane; Thed N. van Leeuwen

doi:10.1093/reseval/rvac049

Valuation regimes in academia: Researchers’ attitudes towards their diversity of activities and academic performance

Nicolas Robinson-Garcia^*, Rodrigo Costas, Gabriela F. Nane, Thed N. van Leeuwen

^*Corresponding author for this work

Applied Probability

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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	https://doi.org/10.1093/reseval/rvac049
Publication status	Published - 2023

Bibliographical note

Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care
Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.

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

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10.1093/reseval/rvac049

postprint-1Accepted author manuscript, 1.47 MB

Cite this

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Valuation regimes in academia: Researchers’ attitudes towards their diversity of activities and academic performance

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Funding

Keywords

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