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Research evaluation has been an essential practice of the regular functioning
of the research system (Zuckerman and Merton, 1971; Cole and Cole,
1973). Reputational competition (Merton, 1957; Ben-David, 1971, 1972;
Whitley, 2000; Dasgupta and David, 1994) has been shaped by mechanisms
of evaluation of research mostly identified with the practice of peer review
for journals’ publications (Campanario, 1998 a, b; Cole, 1998). Some of
these practices for publishing papers or awarding prizes have been extended
to the allocation of the funding for research from governments or
intermediary organisations (Chubin and Hackett, 1991; Cole, Rubin and
Cole, 1978).
More recently, state research evaluation systems (RES)1 have been
developed in a number of countries in the context of new public
management practices, scarce public funds and increasing accountability
requests (Georghiou, 1995), and the allocation of resources for
organizations and programs has become more and more connected to the
evaluation of research (Geuna and Martin, 2003; Liefner, 2003).
Additionally, the dominant ex ante or project appraisal approaches have
been complemented by the institutionalisation of retrospective ex post
evaluations of research performance2, as the papers by Kneller, Cozzens
ands others in this volume discuss. |
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