Grit Laudel

Experteninterviews und qualitative Inhaltsanalyse

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What do we measure by co-authorships?

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The art of getting funded: How scientists adapt to their funding conditions

Interviews with scientists about the content and reward of collaborations, and classification of contributions of co-authors and scientists cited in acknowledgements, identified six types of research collaborations with distinct patterns of rewards; showed that about half of the collaborations are invisible in formal communication channels because they are not rewarded; and showed that about one third of the collaborations are rewarded only by acknowledgements. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

Studying the brain drain: Can bibliometric methods help?

Shrinking university budgets make university researchers more and more dependent on external funds. As a response, they develop specific strategies for selecting external funds and for adapting their research. In a comparative interview-based study of experimental physicists working at Australian and German universities, connections between their funding conditions and adaptation strategies were analysed. Strategies differ between scientists in the two countries because of different funding conditions; and they differ between top scientists and others. The adaptation affects the content of research, for instance, its quality and innovativeness. The findings can be generalised to resource-intensive fields that underwent a shift from recurrent to external funding. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

Introduction to a special issue on the assessment of interdisciplinary research

Today science policy makers in many countries worry about a brain drain, i.e., about permanently losing their best scientists to other countries. However, such a brain drain has proven to be difficult to measure. This article reports a test of bibliometric methods that could possibly be used to study the brain drain on the micro-level. An investigation of elite mobility must solve the three methodological problems of delineating a specialty, identifying a specialtys elite and identifying international mobility and migration. The first two problems were preliminarily solved by combining participant lists from elite conferences (Gordon conferences) and citation data. Mobility was measured by using the address information of publication databases. The delineation of specialties has been identified as the crucial problem in studying elite mobility on the micro- level. Policy concerns of a brain drain were confirmed by measuring the mobility of the biomedical Angiotensin specialty.

The Social Construction Of Bibliometric Evaluations

HILE BOTH interdisciplinary research and evaluations grow throughout the science system, the two meet each other with increasing frequency. More and more assessments — of manuscripts, project proposals, funding programmes, and research organisations — are confronted by interdisciplinarity, that is, by research that combines knowledge from different fields. The problem of how to assess interdisciplinary research is thus becoming more and more pressing. The common response to this problem by evaluators is to ‘muddle through’ by slightly adapting evaluation procedures for disciplinary research. British funding agencies adapted the weight of assessment criteria for some small grant schemes aimed at encouraging interdisciplinary research by putting emphasis on the applicant’s track record and the potential impact of the interdisciplinary collaboration rather than experimental details (O’Toole, 2001). Members of the Canadian Research Council proposed the opposite, namely to put less emphasis on the track record when applicants start to work in a field that is new to them (NSERC, 2004). US funding agencies introduced a procedural solution by giving their managers leeway to put a higher priority on interdisciplinary proposals that peer reviewers seem to have unjustly overlooked (Brainard, 2002). British and Canadian funding agencies introduced additional interdisciplinary committees (POST, 2002: 4; INST, 2002: chap. 3). This strategy not only brings competent reviewers together but also avoids direct competition between interdisciplinary and disciplinary grant proposals, because the latter are ranked separately (Brainard, 2002). These experiments confirm that there is no consensus about the best way of assessing interdisciplinary research. What assistance can be offered by science studies? Not much. While studies on both interdisciplinary research and research evaluation (in particular of the peer-review mechanism) have a long tradition, there is hardly any study which deals with the intersection of both. Studies on interdisciplinarity concentrated on the actual research process, often with the aim of finding conditions that promote or hinder (see for example the contributions in Weingart and Stehr, 2000), without taking the assessment of such processes into account (an exception is Hackett’s chapter in that volume). The problem of interdisciplinarity has surfaced in studies of peer-review processes with reviewers from different fields. These studies revealed that it can be difficult to integrate different scientific perspectives of reviewers in grant review processes (eg Porter and Rossini, 1985; Travis and Collins, 1991) or in the review of journal articles (e.g. Fiske and Fogg, 1990; Mahoney, 1977). Specific precautions are necessary to make sure that interdisciplinary research is not the looser in the assessment process. Procedure matters, as it is clearly stated in the recommendations of a recent workshop on “Quality Assessment in Interdisciplinary Research and Education” of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. ‘Getting the process right’ is one of the central challenges of the evaluation of W

Is external research funding a valid indicator for research performance

While national systems of research evaluation vary in many dimensions, they all need to rely on very few methods of evaluating research performance. These methods constitute a crucial interface between the science system and science policy through which information about research is translated into strategic knowledge for policy decisions. They therefore merit specific attention.

Evaluation Without Evaluators

Although ‘research income’ is one of the most common indicators for assessing research quality, its validity has never been systematically investigated. The conditions under which Australian and German physicists obtain external funding were analysed in a comparative qualitative study. The study demonstrates that success in obtaining external funding is only partly related to the quality of researchers and their proposals. Therefore, the validity of a straightforward counting of external funding must be assumed to be low. A comparison of external funding with citation indicators shows ways to improve the validity of indicators based on external funding. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

Integrating scientometric indicators into sociological studies: methodical and methodological problems

The Australian research evaluation system (RES) is unique in its exclusive reliance on a funding formula. For each university, statistics on income from competitive research grants, numbers of publications, numbers of current research students (Masters and PhD students), and timely completions of Masters and PhD studies are collected and used to calculate the allocation of state funds without any further consideration.

Advantages and dangers of ‘remote’ peer evaluation

This article discusses the methodological problems of integrating scientometric methods into a qualitative study. Integrative attempts of this kind are poorly supported by the methodologies of both the sociology of science and scientometrics. Therefore it was necessary to develop a project-specific methodological approach that linked scientometric methods to theoretical considerations. The methodological approach is presented and used to discuss general methodological problems concerning the relation between (qualitative) theory and scientometric methods. This discussion enables some conclusions to be drawn as to the relations that exist between scientometrics and the sociology of science.