New CWTS blog

Dear readers,

It is with great pleasure that we announce a new platform for blog posts emanating from our institute: the CWTS blog.

How important is the number of citations to my scientific work really? How is evaluation influencing knowledge production? Should my organisation support the DORA declaration? When does it (not) make sense to use the h-index? What does a competitive yet conscientious career system look like? What is the relation between scientific and social impact of research? How can we value diversity in scholarship?

The CWTS blog brings together ideas, commentary, and (book) reviews about the latest developments in scientometrics, research evaluation, and research management. It is written for those interested in bibliometric and scientometric indicators and tools, implications of monitoring, measuring, and managing research, and the potential of quantitative and qualitative methods for understanding the dynamics of scientific research.

This a moderated blog with a small editorial team consisting of Sarah de Rijcke, Ludo Waltman, and Paul Wouters. The blog posts are written by researchers affiliated to CWTS.

In the meantime, this current Citation Culture blog will be discontinued. Thank you all very much for your dedicated readership. We hope you will enjoy reading the new blog!

You can subscribe to the mailinglist or rss feed at www.cwts.nl/blog

The Facebook-ization of academic reputation?

Guest blog post by Alex Rushforth

The Facebook-ization of academic reputation? ResearchGate, Academia.edu and Everyday neoliberalism

How do we explain the endurance of neoliberal modes of government following the 2008 financial crisis, which could surely have been its death-knoll? This is the question of a long, brilliant, book by historian of science and economics Philip Mirowski, called ‘Never let a serious crisis go to waste’. Mirowski states that explanations of the crisis to date have accounted for only part of the answer. Part of the persistence of neo-liberal ideals of personhood and markets comes not just directly from ‘the government’ or particular policies, but is a result of very mundane practices and technologies which surround us in our everyday lives.

I think this book can tell us a lot about new ways in which our lives as academics are increasingly being governed. Consider web platforms like ResearchGate and Academia.edu: following Mirowski, these academic professional networking sites might be understood as technologies of ‘everyday neoliberalism’. These websites share a number of resemblances with social networking sites like Facebook – which Mirowski takes as an exemplar par excellence of this phenomenon. He argues Facebook teaches its users to become ‘entrepreneurs of themselves’, by fragmenting the self and reducing it to something transient (ideals emanating from the writings of Hayek and Friedman), to be actively and promiscuously re-drawn out of various click-enabled associations (accumulated in indicators like numbers of ‘likes’, ‘friends’, comments) (Mirowski, 2013, 92).

Let us briefly consider what kind of academic Academia.edu and ResearchGate encourages and teaches us to become. Part of the seductiveness of these technologies for academics, I suspect, is that we already compete within reputational work organisations (c.f. Whitley, 2000), where self-promotion has always been part-and-parcel of producing new knowledge. However, such platforms also intensify and reinforce dominant ideas and practices for evaluating research and researchers, which – with the help of Mirowski’s text – appear to be premised on neoliberal doctrines. Certainly the websites build on the idea that the individual (as author) is the central locus of knowledge production. Yet what is distinctly neoliberal perhaps is how the individual – through the architecture and design of the websites – experiences their field of knowledge production as a ‘marketplace of ideas’ (on the neo-liberal roots of this idea, see Mirowski, 2011).

This is achieved through ‘dashboards’ that display a smorgasbord of numerical indicators. When you upload your work, the interface generates the Impact Factor of journals you have published in and various other algorithmically-generated scores (ResearchGate score anyone?). There are also social networking elements like ‘contacts’, enabling you to follow and be followed by other users of the platform (your ‘peers’). This in turn produces a count of how well ‘networked’ you are. In short, checking one’s scores, contacts, downloads, views, and so on is supposed to give an impression of an individual user’s market standing, especially as one can compare these with scores of other users. Regular email notifications provide reminders to continue internalizing these demands and to report back regularly to the system. These scores and notices are not final judgments but a record of accomplishments so far, motivating the user to carry on with the determination to do better. Given the aura of ‘objectivity’ and ‘market knows best’ mantra these indicators present to us, any ‘failings’ are the responsibility of the individual. Felt anger is to be turned back inward on the self, rather than outwards on the social practices and ideas through which such ‘truths’ are constituted. A marketplace of ideas indeed.

Like Facebook, what these academic professional networking sites do seems largely unremarkable and uncontroversial, forming part of background infrastructures which simply nestle into our everyday research practices. One of their fascinating features is to promulgate a mode of power that is not directed to us ‘from above’ – no manager or formal audit exercise is coercing researchers into signing-up. We are able to join and leave of our own volition (many academics don’t even have accounts). Yet these websites should be understood as component parts of a wider ‘assemblage’ of metrics and evaluation techniques with which academics currently juggle, which in turn generate certain kinds of tyrannies (see Burrows, 2012).

Mirowski’s book provides a compelling set of provocations for digital scholars, sociologists of science, science studies, higher education scholars and others to work with. Many studies have been produced documenting reforms to the university which have bared various hallmarks of neoliberal political philosophical doctrines (think audits, university rankings, temporary labour contracts, competitive funding schemes and the like). Yet these latter techniques may only be the tip of the iceberg: Mirowski has given us cause to think more imaginatively about how ‘everyday’ or ‘folk’ neoliberal ideas and practices become embedded in our academic lives through quite mundane infrastructures, the effects of which we have barely begun to recognise, let alone understand.

References

Burrows, R. 2012. Living with the h-index? Metric assemblages in the contemporary academy. Sociological Review, 60, 355-372.

Mirowski, P. 2011. Science-mart : privatizing American science, Cambridge, Mass. ; London, Harvard University Press.

Mirowski, P. 2013. Never let a serious crisis go to waste : how neoliberalism survived the financial meltdown, New York, Verso.

Whitley, R. 2000. The intellectual and social organization of the sciences, Oxford England ; New York, Oxford University Press.

 

 

CWTS in new European consortium

Good news came our way yesterday! CWTS will be partner in a new project funded by the Swedisch Riksbankens Jubileumsfond: Knowledge in science and policy. Creating an evidence base for converging modes of governance in policy and science (KNOWSCIENCE). The project is coordinated by Merle Jacob (Lund University, Sweden). Other partners in the consortium are Dietmar Braun (Lausanne University, Switzerland), Tomas Hellström (Department of Business Administration, Lund University), Niilo Kauppi (CNRS, Strasbourg, France), Duncan Thomas & Maria Nedeva (Manchester Institute of Innovation Research, Manchester Business School, UK), Rikard Stankiewitz (Lund University), and Sarah de Rijcke & Paul Wouters (CWTS).

KNOWSCIENCE focuses on deepening our understanding of the interplay between policy instruments intended to govern the structural organization of higher education and research (HER) and the informal rules and processes that organisations have developed for ensuring the validity and quality of the knowledge they produce. KNOWSCIENCE refers to this as the interplay between structural and epistemic governance, and argue that an understanding of this relationship is necessary for building sustainable knowledge producing arrangements and institutions and securing society’s long-term knowledge provision.

The main research question guiding the project is ‘how do policy and the science systems co-produce the conditions for sustainable knowledge provision?’ Specifically we ask:

(a) How are HER policy steering mechanisms enabled, disabled and transformed throughout the HER sector via the academic social system?

(b) What are the most significant unintended consequences of HER policy on the HER system? and

(c) What types of policy frameworks would be required to meet these challenges?

The announcement on the RJ website can be found via this link.

Indicator-considerations eclipse other judgments on the shop-floor | Keynote Sarah de Rijcke ESA Prague, 26 August 2015

This invited lecture at the ESA conference in Prague drew on insights from the Leiden Manifesto and from two recent research projects at our institute in the Evaluation Practices in Context research group. These research projects show how indicators influence knowledge production in the life sciences and social sciences, and how in- and exclusion mechanisms get built into the scientific system through certain uses of evaluative metrics. Our findings point to a rather self-referential focus on metrics and a lack of space for responsible, relevant research in the scientific practices under study. On the basis of these findings I argued in the talk that we need an alternative moral discourse in research assessment, centered around the need to address growing inequalities in the science system. Secondly, the talk considered the most pertinent issues for the community of sociologists from the Leiden Manifesto for research metrics (Hicks, Wouters, Waltman, De Rijcke & Rafols, Nature, 23 April 2015).

http://www.slideshare.net/sarahderijcke/slideshelf

See also:

Rushforth & De Rijcke (2015). Accounting for Impact? The Journal Impact Factor and the making of biomedical research in the Netherlands. Minerva, 53(2), 117-139.

De Rijcke, S. & Rushforth, A.D. (2015). To intervene, or not to intervene, is that the question? On the role of scientometrics in research evaluation. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 66 (9), 1954-1958.

Hicks, D., Wouters, P.F., Rafols, I., De Rijcke, S. & Waltman, L. (2015). The Leiden Manifesto for Research Metrics. Nature, 23 April 2015.

Hammarfelt & De Rijcke (2015). Accountability in Context: Effects of research evaluation systems on publication practices, disciplinary norms, and individual working routines in the faculty of Arts at Uppsala University. Research Evaluation, 24(1), 63-77.

Leiden Manifesto for research metrics published in Nature

We’re happy to announce the publication of ten principles to guide the use of metrics in research evaluation – a collaboration between Diana Hicks (Georgia Tech), Ismael Rafols (Ingenio/SPRU), Paul Wouters, Sarah de Rijcke and Ludo Waltman (CWTS). The principles were formulated on the basis of input from the scientometric community during a special session on the development of good practices for metrics use at the STI/ENID conference in Leiden (September 2014).

CWTS part of H2020 COST Action to stimulate integrity and responsible research

Good news came our way recently! Thed van Leeuwen, Paul Wouters and myself will be part of an EC-funded H2020 COST Action on Promoting Integrity as an Integral Dimension of Excellence in Research (PRINTEGER). Main applicants Hub Zwart and Willem Halffman (Radboud University Nijmegen) brought together highly skilled partners for this network from the Free University Brussels, the University of Tartu (Estonia), Oslo and Akershus University College, Leiden University, and the Universities of Bonn, Bristol, and Trento.

The primary goal of the COST Action is to encourage a research culture that treats integrity as an integral part of doing research, instead of an externally driven steering mechanism. Our starting point: in order to stimulate integrity and responsible research, new forms of governance are needed that are firmly grounded in and informed by research practice.

Concretely, the work entailed in the project will consist of A) a systematic review of integrity cultures and practices; B) an analysis and assessment of current challenges, pressures, and opportunities for research integrity in a demanding and rapidly changing research system; and C) the development and testing of tools and policy recommendations enabling key players to effectively address issues of integrity, specifically directed at science policy makers, research managers and future researchers.

CWTS will contribute to the network with

• A bibliometric analysis of ‘traces of fraud’ (e.g. retracted articles, manipulative editorials, non-existent authors and papers, fake journals, bogus conferences, non-existent universities), against the background of general shifts in publication patterns, such as changing co-authoring practices, instruments as authors, or the rise of hyper-productive authors;
• Two in-depth cases studies of research misconduct, not the evident or spectacular, but more particularly reflecting dilemmas and conflicts that occur in grey areas. Every partner will provide two cases; ours will most likely focus on cases of questionable integrity of journal editors (for example cases of impact factor manipulation);
• Act as task leader on formulation of Advice for research support organisations, including on IT tools. This task will draw conclusions from the research on the operation of the research system, specifically publication infrastructures such as journals, libraries, or data repositories;
• Like all other partners in the network, we will set up small local advisory panels consisting of five to ten key stakeholders of the project: research policy makers, research leaders or managers, research support organisations, and early career scientists. These panels will meet for a scoping consultation at the start of the projects, for a halfway consultation to discuss intermediate results and further choices to be made, and for a near-end consultation to test the pertinence of tools and advice at a point where we can still make changes to accommodate for stakeholder input.

Knowledge, control and capitalism: what epistemic capitalism makes us see

Guest blog post by Thomas Franssen

On February 5^th Max Fochler (University of Vienna) gave a talk during an extended EPIC research group seminar at the CWTS in Leiden. Fochler posed a crucial and critical question regarding knowledge production in the 21th century; can we understand contemporary practices of knowledge production in and outside academia as practices of epistemic capitalism? With this term, defined as ‘the accumulation of capital through the act of doing research’, Max wanted to address the regimes of worth that play a crucial role in life science research in Austria.

Max was interested in exploring the concept of capitalism as it denotes both forms of ascribing worth or value to something (in this case to knowledge and doing research), and the sets of practices in which these forms of worth are embedded. In this way it allows one to talk about which registers or regimes of value are visible as well as the institutional context in which these forms of worth ‘count’ for something.

Using research on the life sciences (partly done with Ulrike Felt and Ruth Müller) Max compared the regimes of value found in biographical interviews with postdocs working in Austrian academia to those of founders, managers and employees of research-active small biotech companies in Austria.

Results showed that the postdocs in their study are preoccupied with their own future employability, and that they assess their own worth in terms of the capital that they can accumulate. This capital consists of publications, impact factors, citations and grant-money. What is especially critical in this respect is that potential sites of work, social relations with others, and choices for particular research topics or model organisms are scrutinized in relation to the effect they might have on the accumulation of capital. Importantly, also for research policy and higher education studies, this is the only strategy that this sample of postdocs sees as viable. They do not see other regimes of valuation available for them. As such they either comply to the rules of the game or opt out of the academic system entirely.

In biotech companies the situation is very different. The accumulation of epistemic capital plays a smaller role in the biographies of those working for biotech companies. The main difference, Max observed, is that failure and success are attributed to companies rather than individuals. The intense competition and focus on the individual as experienced by postdocs in the life sciences is less intense in biotech. As such, the essence of working in biotech is not the accumulation of capital, but the development of the company. Capital is not an end in itself but used strategically when possible.

Thinking through epistemic capitalism with biodiversity

Esther Turnhout (Wageningen University) was invited by Sarah to comment on Max Fochler’s talk. Turnhout’s research focuses on information and accountability infrastructures in forest certification and auditing in global value chains. She started her response by asking whether the concept of epistemic capitalism made her look at her own case stuy materials differently and if so how? Not to interrogate the concept and test it empirically but rather to make clear what it highlights and what it affords.

Her criticism of the term came down to two aspects, which she explained using the case of biodiversity. Most importantly, the concept of epistemic capitalism ties the development of knowledge to the accumulation of capital directly and it has the tendency to reduce everything it captures to one single mechanism or logic.

To make her case, Esther traced the knowledge making practices in biodiversity research historically. She did so by focusing on the rise of so-called ecosystem services. Within ecosystem services biodiversity knowledge has become mainly utilitarian, and biodiversity itself an object that presents economic value because it has not yet been destroyed. Think for example of forest carbon, which represents a value on the carbon market as long as it is locked in the forest itself.

So here, in the commodification of biodiversity, knowledge and capital are again closely related. This, however, is not the main argument that Esther took from this example. Rather, she argued that in many ways ecosystem services are very similar to the history of biodiversity knowledge. In all cases, the knowledge produced must be rendered technical, it is assumed to be linear and it privileges scientific expertise. More importantly, there is a preoccupation with ‘complete knowledge’, which is seen as needed for effective conservation. Also, this type of knowledge is increasingly used for managerial concerns to measure success or effectiveness of policy.

As such, disconnected from capitalist or economic concerns, in biodiversity knowledge three logics come together: a technocratic logic, a managerial logic, and a logic of control. For her case, a focus on epistemic capitalism and the accumulation of capital does not work so well. The issue of a technocratic ideal of total control would disappear from view if ecosystems services are only regarded as a commodification of nature. It is the issue of control, which can be understood from a range of logics (technocratic, managerial even aesthetic), that currently prevents urgently needed action. This is because there is an experienced lack of ‘total information’, a total which – seen from technocratic and managerial logics – is needed to act. According to Turnhout it is this utopian ideal of ‘technocratic control through complete information’ that should be criticised much more strongly.

In Search of Excellence? Debating the Merits of Introducing an Elite Dutch University Model

Report by Alex Rushforth

Should the Netherlands strive for excellence in its university systems? Will maintaining quality suffice? This was the topic of a recent panel debate at the WTMC annual meeting on 21 November 2014 in De Balie, Amsterdam. Organised and chaired by Willem Halffman, the session focused on an article published by Barend Van Der Meulen in the national newspaper De Volkskrant, which advocated the need to produce two excellent universities which excel on internationally published rankings, thereby creating a new top-tier in the Dutch higher education system.

Both van der Meulen and Halffman presented their views, with an opposing position also coming from Sally Wyatt. Completing the panel, CWTS’s very own Paul Wouters provided results from recent empirical work about rankings.

Barend van der Meulen’s call for an elite university stemmed from the fact Dutch universities perennially sit outside of the top-50 in Shanghai and Times Higher Education rankings. For him the message is clear: the Netherlands is repeatedly failing to enhance its reputation as an elite player among global universities, a position which ought to cause concern. Van der Meulen stated that his call for an elite university model is part of a need to create an expanded repertoire of what universities are and what they should do in the Netherlands. The pursuit of rankings through this vehicle is therefore tightly coupled with a rejection of the status quo. Rankings are a social technology which ought to be harnessed for quality improvement and as tools through which to promote democratic participation by equipping students and policymakers with tools to make judgments and exert some influence over universities. Alternative modes of evaluation like peer review provide closed systems in which only other academics can make judgments, leaving university activities unaccountable to external modes of evaluation. This ‘ivory tower’ situation reminiscent of the 1980s is an image Van Der Meulen wishes to escape from, as ultimately it damages credibility and legitimacy of universities. The reliance on public money for research and education makes the moral case for university improvement and accountability particularly pressing in the Netherlands. For Van Der Meulen, the ‘good enough’ university (see Wyatt’s argument below) is not enough, given that excellence is imposing itself as a viable and increasingly important alternative.

First to oppose the motion in favour of elite universities was Willem Hallfman, whose talk built on a reply co-authored with Roland Bal, also in De Volkskrant. In the talk Halffman questioned the very foundations of the idea that ‘excellence’ ought to be pursued. Drawing unflattering comparisons between the research budget of Harvard University and that of the entire Netherlands, it was argued that competing within a global superleague would require a radical expansion of existing research budgets and wage structures across the Dutch university system, which he felt unrealistic and unreasonable against a backdrop of crisis in public finances. As well as reproducing national elites, Halffman also questioned the desirability of ranking systems which promote academic stars and the consequences this brings to institutions of science in general and Dutch universities in particular. Football-style league tables provide poor models on which to rate universities, as in contrast with sport where a winner-takes-all logic is central, for universities embodying a broad repertoire of societal functions, it is not clear what ‘winning’ means and how this would be made visible and commensurable through performance indicators.

Sally Wyatt recounted her personal experiences of the shock she encountered when studying and working in British universities in the 1980s, having grown-up in Canada within a period of prosperity and social mobility. These experiences fired a series of warning shots not to go down a road of pursuing excellence. When a move to the Netherlands came about in 1999, it promised her an oasis away from the turmoil the British university system had faced as a result of Thatcherite policy reforms. With the emergence of the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) and its ranking logic comes also a rise in managerial positions and policies, decline in working conditions, and a widening gender gap. Gone also was a latent class system engrained in the culture of universities, with dominant elite institutions the site of social stratification reproduced across generations, which rankings merely encourage and reinforce. Despite erosion of certain positive attributes in universities since her arrival in the Netherlands, Wyatt argued that the Dutch system still preserves enough of a ‘level-playing field’ in terms of funding allocation to merit fierce resistance to any introduction of an elite university model. For Wyatt sometimes it is better to promote the ‘good enough’ than to chase an imperialist and elitist vision of ‘excellence’.

Drawing on work on university and hospital rankings carried-out with Sarah De Rijcke (CWTS), Iris Wallenburg and Roland Bal (Erasmus MC, Rotterdam), Paul Wouters’ talk advocated the need for a more fine-grained STS investigations into the kinds of work that goes into rankings, who is doing it, and in what situations. What is at stake in studying rankings then is not simply the critique of this or that tool, but a more pervasive (and sometimes invisible) logic/set of practices encountered across public organisations like universities and hospitals. Wouters advocated a move towards combining audit society critiques (which tend to be top-down) with STS insights into how ranking is practiced across various organisational levels in universities. This would provide a more promising platform through which to inform debates of the kind playing-out over the desirability of the elite university.

So the contrast between positions was stark. Are rankings – these seemingly ubiquitous ordering mechanisms of contemporary social life – something the Netherlands can afford to back away from in governing its universities? If they are being pursued anyway, shouldn’t policy intervene and assist a more systematic pursuit up the rankings which would enable more pronounced successes? Or is it necessary to oppose the very notion that the Netherlands needs to excel in a ‘globally competitive’ race, particularly given the seeming arbitrariness of many of the metrics according to which prestige gets attributed via ranking mechanisms? Despite polarization on what is to be done, potential for extending STS’s conceptual and empirical apparatus to mediate these discussions seemed to strike a chord among panelists and the audience alike. No doubt this stimulating debate touches on a set of issues that will not be going away quickly, and is one on which the WTMC community is surely well placed to intervene.

Ethics and misconduct – Review of a play organized by the Young Academy (KNAW)

This is a guest blog post by Joost Kosten. Joost is PhD student at CWTS and member of the EPIC working group. His research focuses on the use of research indicators from the perspective of public policy. Joost obtained an MSc in Public Administration (Leiden University) and was also trained in Political Science (Stockholm University) and Law (VU University Amsterdam).

Scientific (mis)conduct – The sins, the drama, the identification

On Tuesday November 18th 2014 the Young Academy of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences organized a performance of the play Gewetenschap by Tony Maples at Leiden University. These weeks, Pandemonia Science Theater is on tour in the Netherlands to perform this piece at several universities. Gewetenschap was inspired by occasional troubles with respect to ethics and integrity which recently occurred in Dutch science and scholarship. Although these troubles concerned grave violations of the scientific code of conduct (i.e., the cardinal sins of fraud, fabrication, and plagiarism) the play focusses on common dilemma’s in a researcher’s everyday life. The title Gewetenschap is a non-existent word, which combines the Dutch words geweten (conscience) and wetenschap (science).

The playwright used confidential interviews with members of the Young Academy to gain insight into the most frequently occurring ethical dilemma’s researchers have to deal with. Professor Karin de Zwaan is a research group leader who has hardly any time to do research herself. She puts much effort in organizing grants, attracting new students and organizing her research group. Post-doc Jeroen Dreef is a very active researcher who does not have enough time to take organizational responsibilities serious. A tenure track is all he wants. Given their other important activities, Karin and Jeroen hardly have any time to supervise PhD student Lotte. One could question the type of support they do give her.

At times, given the reaction on scenes of the drama piece, the topics presented were clearly recognized by the audience. Afterwards, the dilemma’s touched upon during the play are presented by prof. Bas Haring. The audience discusses the following topics:

• Is there a conflict between the research topics a researcher likes himself and what the research group expects her/him to do?
• In one of the scenes, the researchers were delighted because of the acceptance of a publication. Haring asks if that exhibits “natural behaviour”. Shouldn’t a researcher be happy with good results instead of a publication being accepted? One of the participants replies that a publication functions as a reward.
• What do you do with your data? Is endless application of a diversity analysis methods until you find nice results a responsible approach?
• What about impact factors (IF)? Bas Haring himself says his IF is 0. “Do you think I am an idiot?” Which role do numbers such as the IF play in your opinion about colleagues? There seems to be quite a diversity of opinions. An early career research says everone knows these numbers are nonsense. An experienced scientist points out that there is a correlation between scores and quality. Someone else expresses his optimism since he expects that this focus on numbers will be over with ten years. This causes another to respond that in the past there was competition too, but in a different way.
• When is someone a co-author? This question results in a lively debate. Apparently, there are considerable differences from field to field. In the medical fields, a co-authorship can be a way to express gratitude to authors who have played a vital role in a research project, such as people who could organize experimental subjects. In this way, a co-authorship becomes a tradeable commodity. A medicine professor points out that in his field, co-authorships can be used to compare a curriculum vitae with the development of status as a researcher. Thus, it can be used as a criterion to judge grant proposals. A good researcher should start with first position co-authorships, later on should have co-authorships somewhere in between the first and last author, and should end his career with papers in which has co-authorships in the last position. Thus, the further the career has been developed, the more the name of the other should be in the final part of the author list. Another participant states that one can deal with co-authorships in three different ways: 1. Co-authors should always have full responsibility for everything in the paper. 2. Similar to openness which is given at the end of a movie, co-authors should clarify what each co-author’s contribution was. 3. Only those who really contributed in writing a paper can be a co-author. The participant admits that this last proposal works in his own field but might not work in other fields.
• Can a researcher exaggerate his findings if he presents them to journalists? Should you keep control over a journalist’s work in order to avoid that he will present things differently? Is it allowed to present untruth information in order to help support your case, just to avoid that a proper scientific argumentation will be too complex for the man in the street?
• Is it allowed to to present your work as having more societal relevance than you really expect? One of the reactions is that researchers are forced to express the societal relevance of their work when they apply for a grant. From the very nature of scientific research it is hardly possible to clearly indicate what society will gain from the results.
• What does a good relationship between a PhD-student and a supervisor look like? What is a good balance between serving the interests of PhD students, serving organizational interests (e.g. the future of the organization by attracting new students and grants), and the own interest of the researcher?

The discussion did not concentrate on the following dilemma´s presented in Gewetenschap:

• To what extent are requirements for grant proposals contradictory? On the one hand, researchers are expected to think ‘out-of-the-box’ while on the other hand they should meet a large amount of requirements. Moreover, should one propose new ideas including the risks which come along, or is it better to walk on the beaten path in order to guarantee successes?
• Should colleagues who did not show respect be served with the same sauce if you have a chance to review their work? Should you always judge scientific work on its merits? Are there any principles of ‘due process’ which should guide peer review?
• Whose are the data if someone contributed to them but moves to another research group or institute?

 

Quality in the age of the impact factor

ISIS, the most prestigious journal in the history of science, moved house last September and its central office is now located at the Descartes Centre for the History and Philosophy of the Sciences and Humanities at Utrecht University. The Dutch science historian H. Floris Cohen took up the position of the editor in chief of the journal. No doubt this underlines the international reputation of the community of historians of science in the Netherlands. Being the editor of the central journal in ones field surely is mark of esteem and quality.

The opening of the editorial office in Utrecht was celebrated with a symposium entitled “Quality in the age of the impact factor”. Since quality of research in history is intimately intertwined with the quality of writing, it seemed particularly apt to call attention to the role of impact factors in humanities fields. I used the occasion to pose the question how we actually define scientific and scholarly quality. How do we recognize quality in our daily practices? And how can this variety of practices be understood theoretically? Which approaches in the field of science and technology studies are most relevant?

In the same month, Pleun van Arensbergen graduated on a very interesting PhD dissertation which dealt with some of the issues, “Talent Proof. Selection Processes in Research Funding and Careers”. Van Arensbergen did her thesis work at the Rathenau Institute in The Hague. The quality of research is increasingly seen as mainly the result of the quality of the people involved. Hence, universities “have openly made it one of their main goals to attract scientific talent” (van Arensbergen, 2014, p. 121). A specific characteristics of this “war for talent” in the academic world is that there is an oversupply of talents and a relative lack of career opportunities, leading to a “war between talents”. The dissertation is a thorough analysis of success factors in academic careers. It is an empirical analysis of how the Dutch science foundation NWO selects early career talent in its Innovational Research Incentives Scheme. The study surveyed researchers about their definitions of quality and talent. It combines this with an analysis of both the outcome and the process of this talent selection. Van Arensbergen paid specific attention to the gender distribution and to the difference between successful and unsuccessful applicants.

Her results point to a discrepancy between the common notion among researchers that talent is immediately recognizable (“you know it when you see it”) and the fact that there are very small differences between candidates that get funded and those that do not. The top and the bottom of the distribution of quality among proposals and candidates are relatively easy to detect. But the group of “good” and “very good” proposals is still too large to be funded. Van Arensbergen and her colleagues did not find a “natural threshold” above which the successful talents can be placed. On the contrary, in one of her chapters they find that researchers who leave the academic system due to lack of career possibilities regularly score higher on a number of quality indicators than those who are able to continue a research career. “This study does not confirm that the university system always preserves the highly productive researchers, as leavers were even found to outperform the stayers in the final career phase (van Arensbergen, 2014, p. 125).

Based on the survey, her case studies and her interviews, Van Arensbergen also concludes that productivity and publication records have become rather important for academic careers. “Quality nowadays seems to a large extent to be defined as productivity. Universities seem to have internalized the performance culture and rhetoric to such an extent that academics even define and regulate themselves in terms of dominant performance indicators like numbers of publications, citations or the H-index. (…) Publishing seems to have become the goal of academic labour.” (van Arensbergen, 2014, p. 125). This does not mean, however, that these indicators determine the success of a career. The study questions “the overpowering significance assigned to these performance measures in the debate, as they were not found to be entirely decisive.” (van Arensbergen, 2014, p. 126) An extensive publication record is a condition but not a guarantee for success.

This relates to another finding: the group process of panel discussions are also very important. With a variety of examples, Van Arensbergen shows how the organization of the selection process shapes the outcome. The face to face interview of the candidate with the panel is for example crucial for the final decision. In addition, the influence of the external peer reports was found to be modest.

A third finding in the talent dissertation is that success in obtaining grants feeds back into ones scientific and scholarly career. This creates a self reinforcing mechanism, which the science historian Robert Merton coined the Matthew effect after the quote from the bible: “For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken even that which he hath.” (Merton, 1968). Van Arensbergen concludes that this means that differences between scholars may initially be small but will increase in the course of time as a result of funding decisions. “Panel decisions convert minor differences in quality into enlarged differences in recognition.”

Combining these three findings leads to some interesting conclusions regarding how we actually define and shape quality in academia. Although panel decisions about who to fund are strongly shaped by the organization of the selection process as well as by a host of other contextual factors (including chance), and although all researchers are aware of the uncertainties in these decisions, this does not mean that these decisions are given less weight. On the contrary, obtaining external grants has become a cornerstone for successful academic careers. Universities even devote considerable resources to make their researchers abler to acquire prestigious grants as well as external funding in general. Although this is clearly instrumental for the organization, Van Arensbergen thinks that grants have become part of the symbolic capital of a researcher and research group and she refers to Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic capital to better understand the implications.

This brings me to my short lecture at the opening of the editorial office of ISIS in Utrecht. Although the experts on bibliometric indicators don’t generally see the Journal Impact Factor as an indicator of quality, socially it seems to partly function like it. But indicators are not alone in shaping how we in practice identify, and thereby define, talent and quality. They flow together with the way quality assurance and measurement processes are organized, the social psychology of panel discussions, the extent to which researchers are visible in their networks, etc. In these complex contextual interactions, indicators do not determine but they are ascribed meaning dependent on the situation in which the researchers find themselves. A good way to think about this, in my view, is developed in the field of material semiotics. This approach which has its roots in the French actor network theory of Bruno Latour and Michel Callon, does not accept a fundamental rupture in reality between the material and the symbolic. Reality as such is the result of complex and interacting translation processes. This is an excellent philosophical basis to understand how scientific and scholarly quality emerge. I see quality not as an attribute of an academic persona or of a particular piece of work, but as the result of the interaction between a researcher (or a manuscript) and the already existing scientific or scholarly infrastructure (eg. the body of published studies). If this interaction creates a productive friction (meaning that there is enough novelty in the contribution but not so much that it is incompatible with the already existing body of work), we see the work or scholar as of high quality. In other words, quality does simply not (yet) exist outside of the systems of quality measurement. The implication of this is that quality itself is a historical category. It is not an invariant but a culturally and historically specific concept that changes and morphes over time. In fact, the history of science is the history of quality. I hope historians of science will take up the challenge to map this history in more empirical and theoretical sophistication than has been done so far.

Literature:

Merton, R. K. (1968). The Matthew Effect in Science. Science, 159, 56–62.

Van Arensbergen, P. (2014). Talent proof : selection processes in research funding and careers. The Hague, Netherlands: Rathenau Institute. Retrieved from http://www.worldcat.org/title/talent-proof-selection-processes-in-research-funding-and-careers/oclc/890766139&referer=brief_results