While modern methods for Information system development generally accept that users should be involved In some way (151, the form of the involvement differs considerabiy. Mostly, users are viewed as reiativeiy passive sources of information, and the invoivement is regarded as "f unctionai," in the sense that it shouid yieid better system requirements and increased acceptance by users. 'We also inciude some valuable comments from two researchers, Cl. Bradley and A. Kjicr, who responded to our initial que.stionnaire, but whose projects did nol in llie end lit our < riteria for PD piojects.

There is substantial literature on research performance differences between male and female researchers, and its explanation. Using publication records of 852 social scientists, we show that performance differences indeed exist. However, our case study suggests that in the younger generation of researchers these have disappeared. If performance differences exist at all in our case, young female researchers outperform young male researchers. The trend in developed societies, that women increasingly outperform men in all levels of education, is also becoming effective in the science system.

Universities are increasingly expected to fulfill a third mission in addition to those of research and education. Universities must demonstrate engagement with society through the application and exploitation of knowledge. As societal impact of research is uncertain, long term and always dependent on other factors, we argue here that evaluation should focus on the conditions under which societal impact is generated rather than on the impact itself. Here we focus on a specific set of those conditions: the interactions between academic researchers and societal actors. Instead of speculating about potential impacts of research, we argue that current productive interactions of researchers with societal stakeholders improve the probability that future societal impact will occur. This article supports this idea by examining in detail several, mainly retrospective examples. As productive interactions are field specific, we restrict ourselves to 'professional adhocracy fields', especially to information and communication technologies (ICT) research. We address the patterns of productive interactions that result in societal impact within this field and we discuss whether differences are observed in contrast to other fields, such as social sciences and humanities (fragmented adhocracies). We end by discussing the implications that these patterns have for societal impact assessment. Shifting the focus to interactions allows assessment of short-term knowledge transfer and other collaborative efforts with stakeholders that contribute to long-term societal impact.

This article presents a comparative analysis of the evolution of national research policies during the past three decades in six European countries (Austria, Italy, France, Netherlands, Norway and Switzerland), with a special focus on the changes of public project funding schemes. It systematically uses indicators on the volume of funding attributed by each instrument and agency, which have been developed in a project of the European network of excellence PRIME. A common model is identified in these countries, where project funding is the second main channel of public funding of research, but also there are considerable variations among them in the share of instruments and agencies, and in beneficiaries. There are three interesting commonalities: a strong increase of project funding volumes; a differentiation of instruments; and a general shift towards instruments oriented to thematic priorities. They also show that individual countries appear to follow quite distinct paths in the organisation setting of funding agencies, and that national differences in funding portfolios persist through time.

We take up the issue of performance differences between male and female researchers, and investigate the change of performance differences during the early career. In a previous paper it was shown that among starting researchers gendered performance differences seem small to non-existent (Van Arensbergen et al. 2012). If the differences do not occur in the early career anymore, they may emerge in a later period, or may remain absent. In this paper we use the same sample of male and female researchers, but now compare performance levels about 10 years later. We use various performance indicators: full/fractional counted productivity, citation impact, and relative citation impact in terms of the share of papers in the top 10 % highly cited papers. After the 10 years period, productivity of male researchers has grown faster than of female researcher, but the field normalized (relative) citation impact indicators of male and female researchers remain about equal. Furthermore, performance data do explain to a certain extent why male careers in our sample develop much faster than female researchers’ careers; but controlling for performance differences, we find that gender is an important determinant too. Consequently, the process of hiring academic staff still remains biased.