In three decades Higher Education Institutions have experienced decreasing trust and increasing demands of accountability from society. The aim is to explore how assessments of departments’ research activities can contribute to improvement of research organization, research culture and credibility. The empirical study is based on reports from two assessment rounds of nine research departments, in 1994 to 2007. Qualitative statements and recom-menda¬tions are transformed to relative quantifiable performance measures on ten different dimensions in order to study development over time and analysis of departments´ variation. Results indicate significant improvement among some departments while others have not managed to such extent
