How incentives trickle down: Local use of a national bibliometric indicator system

Unique, but still best practice? The Research Excellence Framework (REF) from an international perspective

“…An independent Danish team of researchers studied its design, organization, effects and legitimacy (Aagaard et al, 2014). As well as advising improvement and further development, the exercise provided the basis for four indepth studies of internationally relevant questions (Aagaard, 2015;Aagaard et al, 2015;Schneider et al, 2015;Bloch and Schneider, 2016). Since 2014, the funded and funding organizations have collaborated on following up the evaluation to improve the model and its practices.…”

“…One example is that the possible disincentive to collaboration (Bloch and Schneider, 2016) and the imbalance in the representation of research fields have been solved by a redesign of the indicator. The fact that the indicator is also used locally, in some contexts for purposes where it is not appropriate and can do harm (Aagaard, 2015), has been accepted and followed up, not only using the advice of establishing inter-institutional learning arenas for proper managerial use of the indicator (Aagaard et al, 2014), but also by agreeing on national recommendations for good conduct on the local level.…”

“…Unlike her successors, Butler could respond in her work to feedback from the participating countries. From reading the results of the evaluation of the PRFS in Norway, de Rijcke et al (2016) note that the Norwegian model is used "despite explicit advice against adoption on lower levels" (Aagaard, 2015), but are not informed about how this problem has been dealt with after the evaluation. It seems that academic literature reviews are not able, as a method, to keep trace of continuously changing national PRFS and thereby to inform mutual learning.…”

Changing Funding Arrangements and the Production of Scientific Knowledge: Introduction to the Special Issue

“…As the introduction of new public management structures and practices has strongly increased the authority of management over research funding (Paradeise et al 2009;Coccia 2009), universities' responses to performance-based funding have the potential to trigger changes in research practices. Some scholars have focused on the role of these meso-level structures in mediating and intervening in the acquisition, organisation, and allocation of external research money (Meier and Schimank 2010;Musselin 2014;Aagaard 2015), but research on performance-based funding has yet to develop an analytical framework that marshals a wide range of variables in order to establish clear causal relationships between funding and the content and conduct of research. This includes the consideration of how research organisations relate to an increasingly diversifying funding landscape for scientific research: How do their attempts to simultaneously increase external funding and control relationships between researchers and funding organisations affect the independence of researchers and thus the production of scientific knowledge?…”

Book editors in the social sciences and humanities: an analysis of publication and collaboration patterns of established researchers in Flanders

“…However, edited books have been included in the research funding system in Flanders since 2010. 8 National incentives like this are probably reflected at the institutional and individual levels, 15,16 although there is little real evidence of this. 17,18 Therefore, in Flanders, individual researchers may well be encouraged to take on book editorships, at least from the second half of the period under study (2000)(2001)(2002)(2003)(2004)(2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)(2011) onwards.…”