Webpages tagged with «Evaluation»

Altmetrics track down and count the mentions of scholarly outputs in social media, news sites, policy papers, and social bookmarking sites. To what extent are they used and valued to measure impact in research funding? This post was originally published by the Europe of Knowledge blog.

In 1986 the United Kingdom pioneered the development of performance-based research funding systems (PRFS) for universities with the introduction of the Research Assessment Exercise; what is now called the Research Excellence Framework (REF). Most European countries have since introduced PRFS for their universities, but not by adopting the REF. A large group of countries use indicators of institutional performances (“metrics” in UK terminology) for funding decisions rather than panel evaluation and peer review. The few countries to have chosen the latter approach either do not use evaluation results for funding allocation or have at least partly replaced the assessment procedures with metrics.

The 2014 REF results show only a very weak relationship between excellence in research and achieving societal impact. This blog post was first published by the LSE Impact blog.