Moving behind research metrics: Responsible research evaluations at Danish Universities

The need for responsible research evaluation is surfacing on international agendas in the form of eg. the Hong Kong principles for assessing researchers. Likewise, the European Commission’s ‘Towards 2030’ universities vision statement cites an ambition to “move beyond existing ranking systems” to avoid "overly-simplistic ways of measuring universities’ research performance”. By these initiatives, universities are incited to seek to adopt new approaches to research evaluation beyond merely using the research metrics at hand.

The PARE-project (Probing 5 arguments for responsible evaluation on HE leaders) examines knowledge and attitudes toward value-driven research assessment among leaders at Danish universities. The idea is that the starting point should not be the availability of data, but rather what is valued about the entity that is under evaluation.

Through semi-structured personal interviews with ten deans and department heads and subsequent content analysis of transcripts, PARE identifies barriers for conducting value-based evaluations in a way that makes them meaningful, responsible, and effective. The project draws on and probes SCOPE – A five-step framework for conducting value-driven responsible research evaluation, developed by the INORMS Research Evaluation Group.

The presentation will present major findings from the project, which at the time of submission is work-in-progress, and will point to incentives for HE leaders for engaging in value-driven responsible research evaluation. Specifically, the session will provide insight into why conducting value-driven evaluations may be seen as challenging by HE leaders and at the same time give suggestions for how to motivate management in engaging in value-driven evaluations.