The rise of metrics and fall of academic autonomy: the digital future of academic freedom

As citation-based metrics are increasingly used for measuring research performance, the formation of academics’ research choices and conceptions of academic freedom are affected. Critically examining the behaviours of academics in today’s competitive publishing landscape, we argue that creeping managerial practices are shaping research choices and perceived opportunities. In addition, observation indicates that the way in which academic freedom is conceptualised is changing as a result of considering academic performance through metrics. This raises questions of whether and to what extent professional and academic autonomy remains in the hands of authors or are instead being outsourced to metrics. Based on 21 semi-structured interviews with academics across the humanities and social sciences, we found metrics relating to assessment, rankings and funding all direct research choices. This research-in-progress paper identifies key issues and outlines future research to understand the wider influence of metrification

Introduction: measuring the impact of arts and humanities research in Europe

The idea for a special section of Research Evaluation for measuring the impact or public value of arts and humanities research (AHR) emerged from the 4-year HeraValue project that started in 2009. HeraValue was funded by the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) organization, a collaborative effort between more than 20 European research funding agencies to support transnational humanities research. The HeraValue project sought to explore how different stakeholders make implicit and explicit statements and judgements about the value of AHR. These research areas had seen persistent failures in the development of performance measures, a failure that might be damaging but could be explained by dissonances between different stakeholder groups

Research assessment in the humanities: problems and challenges

Research assessment is going to play a new role in the governance of universities and research institutions. Evaluation of results is evolving from a simple tool for resource allocation towards policy design. In this respect "measuring" implies a different approach to quantitative aspects as well as to an estimation of qualitative criteria that are difficult to define. Bibliometrics became so popular, in spite of its limits, just offering a simple solution to complex problems. The theory behind it is not so robust but available results confirm this method as a reasonable trade off between costs and benefits. Indeed there are some fields of science where quantitative indicators are very difficult to apply due to the lack of databases and data, in few words the credibility of existing information. Humanities and social sciences (HSS) need a coherent methodology to assess research outputs but current projects are not very convincing. The possibility of creating a shared ranking of journals by the value of their contents at either institutional, national or European level is not enough as it is raising the same bias as in the hard sciences and it does not solve the problem of the various types of outputs and the different, much longer time of creation and dissemination. The web (and web 2.0) represents a revolution in the communication of research results mainly in the HSS, and also their evaluation has to take into account this change. Furthermore, the increase of open access initiatives (green and gold road) offers a large quantity of transparent, verifiable data structured according to international standards that allow comparability beyond national limits and above all is independent from commercial agents. The pilot scheme carried out at the university of Milan for the Faculty of Humanities demonstrated that it is possible to build quantitative, on average more robust indicators, that could provide a proxy of research production and productiivity even in the HSS

Benchmarking the business performance of departmental space in universities

Purpose and Theory: In UK higher education institutions, facilities management performance tends to be measured in space utilisation and space cost. A new approach uses the �return on investment� (ROI) concept of income generation to highlight space performance at faculty/department/building level. Design and approach: Using space data from several English universities and data envelopment analysis (DEA), six types of academic units (departments, institutes or similar) are compared in regard of their respective research and teaching income. This technique allows mapping out the total �envelope� with the best performers at the edge, showing what improvement/change would be needed for the others in the group to match their performance. Findings: This is a viable method of benchmarking and gives participating institutions better and more strategic and business-oriented feedback on the performance of their space envelope than mere cost comparisons. It can potentially inform strategic decisions about university estates. However, there are barriers to applying this approach: problems posed by issues of classification and diverse organisational structures can be overcome, but lack of collaboration of facilities/estates and finance directorates; lack of centralised, accurate and detailed data pose more serious challenges

The Education Quality Measuring: American Experience

The US Higher Education Reform is due to certain processes of competitiveness, market orientation, the tendency to form a single space for education. The American system of Higher Education has integrated the best in the education of other countries and thus helped the country overcome crises, to some extent solve the problems of racial discrimination, unemployment, poverty, improved the situation of women, people with disabilities, national minorities. The historical events, socio-economic transformations, aspiration to be a leader in the world market respectively have influenced the development of Higher Education. Due to reforms in American society, education has become more open, various, versatile. The Americans highly value the Higher Education and believe that education is necessary for a conscious political life, the functioning of a democratic government, the development of economic and political International relations. The American education serving the dynamic and global economy is effective and capable of developing in the conditions of limited public resources. This article focuses on the measurement of education quality and accreditation of Higher Learning Institutions in the USA; the analysis of educational activities of American universities; the coverage of accreditation and education performance of Higher Learning Institutions in the United States; these indicators usage in the process of education quality assessing in American universities; the essence disclosure of measurement the education quality with helping "added value" on the basis by American scientists research; the borrowing American experience into the Higher Learning Institutions in Ukraine

'Impact', 'value' and 'bad economics' : making sense of the problem of value in the arts and humanities

Questions around the value of the arts and humanities to the contemporary world, the benefits they are expected to bring to the society that supports them through funding have assumed an increased centrality within a number of disciplines, not limited to humanities scholarship. Especially problematic, yet crucial, is the issue of the measurement of such public value, in the context to an ostensible commitment to evidence-based policy making over the past twenty years. This article takes as a starting point a discussion of the ‘cultural value debate’ as it has developed within British cultural policy: here, the discussion of ‘value’ has been inextricably linked to the challenge of ‘making the case’ for the arts and for public cultural funding. The paper discusses the problems with the persisting predominance of economics in shaping current approaches to framing articulations of ‘value’ in the policy-making context for both the arts sector and higher education. It concludes with a plea for a collaborative effort to resist the economic doxa, to reclaim and reinvent the impact agenda as a route towards the establishment of a new public humanities

Infrastructures for digital research: new opportunities and challenges

No abstract available

A Review of Theory and Practice in Scientometrics

Scientometrics is the study of the quantitative aspects of the process of science as a communication system. It is centrally, but not only, concerned with the analysis of citations in the academic literature. In recent years it has come to play a major role in the measurement and evaluation of research performance. In this review we consider: the historical development of scientometrics, sources of citation data, citation metrics and the “laws" of scientometrics, normalisation, journal impact factors and other journal metrics, visualising and mapping science, evaluation and policy, and future developments

Arts and Humanities Literature: Bibliometric Characteristics of Contributions by Turkish Authors

Scholarly communication in arts and humanities differs from that in the sciences. Arts and humanities scholars rely primarily on monographs as amedium of publication whereas scientists consider articles that appear in scholarly journals as the single most important publication outlet. The number of journal citation studies in arts and humanities is therefore limited. In this article, we investigate the bibliometric characteristics of 507 arts and humanities journal articles written by authors affiliated with Turkish institutions and indexed in the Arts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI) between the years 1975–2003. Journal articles constituted more than 60% of all publications. One third of all contributions were published during the last 4 years (1999–2003) and appeared in 16 different journals. An overwhelming majority of contributions (91%) were written in English, and 83% of them had single authorship. Researchers based at Turkish universities produced 90% of all publications. Two thirds of references in publications were to monographs. The median age of all references was 12 years. Eighty percent of publications authored by Turkish arts and humanities scholars were not cited at all while the remaining 20% (or 99 publications) were cited 304 times (anaverage of three citations per publication). Self-citation ratio was 31%. Two thirds of the cited publications were cited for the first time within 2 years of their publications