The current range and volume of research evaluation-related literature is extensive and incorporates scholarly and policy/practice-related perspectives. This reflects academic and practical interest over many decades and trails the changing funding and reputational modalities for universities, namely increased selectivity applied to institutional research funding streams and the perceived importance of university rankings and other reputational devices. To make sense of this highly diverse body of literature, we undertake a critical review of over 350 works constituting, in our view, the ‘state-of-the-art’ on institutional performance-based research evaluation arrangements (PREAs). We focus on PREAs because they are becoming the predominant means world-wide to allocate research funds and accrue reputation for universities. We highlight the themes addressed in the literature and offer critical commentary on the balance of scholarly and policy/practice-related orientations. We then reflect on five limitations to the state-of-the-art and propose a new agenda, and a change of perspective, to progress this area of research in future studies.
This article offers a framework for the study of research governance effects on scientific fields framed by notions of research quality and the epistemic, organizational, and career choices they entail. The framework interprets the contested idea of ‘quality’ as an interplay involving notion origins, quality attributes, and contextual sites. We mobilize the origin and site components, to frame organizational-level events where quality notions inform selections, or selection events. Through the dynamic interplay between notions selected at specific sites, we contend, local actors enact research quality cumulatively, by making choices that privilege certain notions over others. In this article, we contribute in four ways. First, we propose an approach to study research governance effects on scientific fields. Second, we introduce first- and second-level effects of research governance paving the way to identify mechanisms through which these different levels of effects occur. Third, we assert that interactions between research spaces and fields leading to effects occur in the context of research organizations, and at nine key selection events. Fourth, and lastly, we discuss an empirical test on an illustration case to demonstrate how this approach can be applied.
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