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In recent years, evaluation of the quality of academic research has become an increasingly important and influential business. It determines, often to a large extent, the amount of research funding flowing into universities and similar…
Academic research groups are treated as complex systems and their cooperative behaviour is analysed from a mathematical and statistical viewpoint. Contrary to the naive expectation that the quality of a research group is simply given by the…
Citation metrics are becoming pervasive in the quantitative evaluation of scholars, journals and institutions. More then ever before, hiring, promotion, and funding decisions rely on a variety of impact metrics that cannot disentangle…
Since the publication of Robert K. Merton's theory of cumulative advantage in science (Matthew Effect), several empirical studies have tried to measure its presence at the level of papers, individual researchers, institutions or countries.…
Using a recently developed model, inspired by mean field theory in statistical physics, and data from the UK's Research Assessment Exercise, we analyse the relationship between the quality of statistics and operational research groups and…
Using the results of the UK's research assessment exercise, we show that the size or mass of research groups, rather than individual caliber or prestige of the institution, is the dominant factor which drives the quality of research teams.…
Systematic evaluations of publicly funded research typically employ a combination of bibliometrics and peer review, but it is not known whether the bibliometric component introduces biases. This article compares three alternative mechanisms…
When performing a national research assessment, some countries rely on citation metrics whereas others, such as the UK, primarily use peer review. In the influential Metric Tide report, a low agreement between metrics and peer review in the…
Bibliometric analysis has firmly conquered its place as an instrument for evaluation and international comparison of performance levels. Consequently, differences in coverage by standard bibliometric databases installed a dichotomy between…
Research funding and reputation in the UK have, for over two decades, been increasingly dependent on a regular peer-review of all UK departments. This is to move to a system more based on bibliometrics. Assessment exercises of this kind…
For many public research organizations, funding creation of science and maximizing scientific output is of central interest. Typically, when evaluating scientific production for funding, citations are utilized as a proxy, although these are…
One of the virtues of peer review is that it provides a self-regulating selection mechanism for scientific work, papers and projects. Peer review as a selection mechanism is hard to evaluate in terms of its efficiency. Serious efforts to…
Many different measures are used to assess academic research excellence and these are subject to ongoing discussion and debate within the scientometric, university-management and policy-making communities internationally. One topic of…
Math anxiety is negatively correlated with student performance and can result in avoidance of further math/STEM classes and careers. Cooperative learning (i.e., group work) is a proven strategy that can reduce math anxiety and has…
A desirable goal of scientific management is to introduce, if it exists, a simple and reliable way to measure the scientific excellence of publicly-funded research institutions and universities to serve as a basis for their ranking and…
The catch-up effect and the Matthew effect offer opposing characterizations of globalization: the former predicts an eventual convergence as the poor can grow faster than the rich due to free exchanges of complementary resources, while the…
Evaluative bibliometrics compares the citation impact of researchers, research groups and institutions with each other across time scales and disciplines. Both factors - discipline and period - have an influence on the citation count which…
Traditional closed peer review systems, which have played a central role in scientific publishing, are often slow, costly, non-transparent, stochastic, and possibly subject to biases - factors that can impede scientific progress and…
We are witnessing a rapid trend towards the adoption of exercises for evaluation of national research systems, generally based on the peer review approach. They respond to two main needs: stimulating higher efficiency in research activities…
Scientometric predictors of research performance need to be validated by showing that they have a high correlation with the external criterion they are trying to predict. The UK Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), together with the growing…