Evaluating science: Opening a debate

Abstract

This article briefly reviews the long-lasting commitment of Social Science Information to the critical analysis of orders of knowledge and the conditions for their creation to, subsequently, reflect on the current co-existence of a plurality of orders of justification across society, including the institutions of knowledge production. Furthermore, it suggests that recent social transformations have accentuated an asymmetry within this plurality, namely towards those forms of judgement that operate with quantitative measures and that are geared towards enhancing performance.

Keep discussing evaluation – A personal and appreciative reflection

“…The concept of evaluation is itself very flexible and riddled with ambiguity. As the editors of this journal pointed out in the very first paragraph of their editorial inviting this debate (Jaclin and Wagner, 2021), evaluation is and has always been an integral part of scientific practice, and so it might make little sense to distinguish too harshly between 'internal' and 'external' evaluation. Welldeserved critique towards my own use of this admittedly oversimplified dichotomy was issued in the responses (see especially Schneider, Horbach and Aagaard), and quite evidently, as analytical tool, the dichotomy is far from sufficient.…”