In January, Nicolás Robinson-García, principal investigator of the COMPARE project, published a paper in collaboration with colleagues Rodrigo Costas (Leiden University), Gabriela Nane (Delft University of Technology), and Thed van Leeuwen (Leiden University), titled <<Valuation regimes in academia: researchers’ attitudes towards their diversity of activities and academic performance>>.
In the study, the authors created a validation model for academic activities based on different evaluative dimensions, personal features and external factors. The abstract reads:
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.
The figure below provides an overview of the proposed model:
For more information about the COMPARE project, you can visit the website here. Find the full article in the renowned journal Research Evaluation by Oxford Press and cite as:
Nicolas Robinson-Garcia, Rodrigo Costas, Gabriela F Nane, Thed N van Leeuwen, Valuation regimes in academia: Researchers’ attitudes towards their diversity of activities and academic performance, Research Evaluation, 2023;, rvac049, https://doi.org/10.1093/reseval/rvac049