Past performance, peer review, and project selection: A case study in the social and behavioral sciences

Does past performance influence success in grant applications? In this study we test whether the grant allocation decisions of the Netherlands Research Council for the Economic and Social Sciences correlate with the past performances of the applicants in terms of publications and citations, and with the results of the peer review process organized by the Council. We show that the Council is successful in distinguishing grant applicants with above-average performance from those with below-average performance, but within the former group no correlation could be found between past performance and receiving a grant. When comparing the best performing researchers who were denied funding with the group of researchers who received it, the rejected researchers significantly outperformed the funded ones. Furthermore, the best rejected proposals score on average as high on the outcomes of the peer review process as the accepted proposals. Finally, we found that the Council under study successfully corrected for gender effects during the selection process. We explain why these findings may be more general than for this case only. However, if research councils are not able to select the 'best' researchers, perhaps they should reconsider their mission. In a final section with policy implications, we discuss the role of research councils at the level of the science system in terms of variation, innovation, and quality control

The evaluation of citation distributions.

This paper reviews a number of recent contributions that demonstrate that a blend of welfare economics and statistical analysis is useful in the evaluation of the citations received by scientific papers in the periodical literature. The paper begins by clarifying the role of citation analysis in the evaluation of research. Next, a summary of results about the citation distributions’ basic features at different aggregation levels is offered. These results indicate that citation distributions share the same broad shape, are highly skewed, and are often crowned by a power law. In light of this evidence, a novel methodology for the evaluation of research units is illustrated by comparing the high- and low-citation impact achieved by the U.S., the European Union, and the rest of the world in 22 scientific fields. However, contrary to recent claims, it is shown that mean normalization at the sub-field level does not lead to a universal distribution. Nevertheless, among other topics subject to ongoing research, it appears that this lack of universality does not preclude sensible normalization procedures to compare the citation impact of articles in different scientific fields.

Research Governance in Academia: Are there Alternatives to Academic Rankings?

Peer reviews and rankings today are the backbone of research governance, but recently came under scrutiny. They take explicitly or implicitly agency theory as a theoretical basis. The emerging psychological economics opens a new perspective. As scholarly research is a mainly curiosity driven endeavor, we include intrinsic motivation and supportive feedback by the peers as important determinants of scholarly behavior. We discuss whether a stronger emphasis on selection and socialization offers an alternative to the present regime of academic rankings.peer reviews, rankings, research governance, agency theory, psychological economics, new public management, economics of science, control theory

Do Mendeley reader counts indicate the value of arts and humanities research?

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Sage in Journal of Librarianship and Information Science on 19/09/2017, available online: https://doi.org/10.1177/0961000617732381 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.Mendeley reader counts are a good source of early impact evidence for the life and natural sciences articles because they are abundant, appear before citations, and correlate moderately or strongly with citations in the long term. Early studies have found less promising results for the humanities and this article assesses whether the situation has now changed. Using Mendeley reader counts for articles in twelve arts and humanities Scopus subcategories, the results show that Mendeley reader counts reflect Scopus citation counts in most arts and humanities as strongly as in other areas of scholarship. Thus, Mendeley can be used as an early citation impact indicator in the arts and humanities, although it is unclear whether reader or citation counts reflect the underlying value of arts and humanities research

The impact of job stress and job satisfaction on employee performance: The case of the Software Companies in Palestine

Objective: This study aims to investigate the effects of job stress and job satisfaction on employee performance considering emotional intelligence as a mediating variable. The study focuses on the factors that affect job stress and job satisfaction such as interpersonal relationships, management support, the relations between management and employees, the function of the group, and work related to employees. Method: The data were collected using online questionnaires from participants working on software projects in Palestine. Based on a sample of 250 responses with a 62.5% effective response rate, and using partial least squares structural equation modeling. Result: The results confirm that the job satisfaction, job stress, and emotional intelligence is a key enabler of employee performance. Moreover, emotional intelligence mediates the relationship between job stress and employee performance. The results also confirm that job stress and job satisfaction are important factors affecting employee performance and productivity. Conclusion: This study contributes to the literature on performance management by addressing the role of emotional intelligence in improving employee performance and productivity