Peer review post mortem. Bewertungen in akademischen Nachrufen

Abstract

Evaluations have a long history in academia. They do not only ascribe worth to individual achievements like article manuscripts and project proposals, but also to the academic personnel. Evaluations of academic persons are particularly apparent in academic obituaries, a genre that evaluates lifetime achievements of deceased academics. Drawing on a qualitative analysis of 216 obituaries that have been published in academic journals, this contribution reconstructs basic characteristics of evaluations of academic persons. The article highlights, first, typical practices of the evaluation of academic persons, second, temporal, national and disciplinary variations of selected evaluation criteria, and, third, it distinguishes modes of evaluation in which academics evaluate either themselves or others. Against this backdrop, the contribution develops an exploratory comparison with other academic and non-academic genres of the evaluation of persons: religious confessions, therapy, and biographies on scientists. The conclusion ties the findings back to general concepts of the sociology of valuation and evaluation.