The assignment of scores for output-based research funding

Abstract

This paper considers the assignment of scores to research output items, such as articles, books, contributions to conference proceedings, doctoral dissertations, etc., under four distribution criteria: the advancement of pure and applied scientific research, the advancement of innovative problem solving, the dissemination of scientific knowledge, and the coverage of the cost of the research. These scores are to be used in the allocation of research funds to the faculties of a university. The present paper describes the experiments carried out within the framework of the Decision Analysis and Support Project of the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis, Laxenburg, Austria. It summarizes the vivid discussions triggered by the experiment, and it also presents the results of an additional experiment.

A fuzzy-enhanced multicriteria decision analysis model for evaluating university Academics’ research output

“…5]: JA>PB>BC>CP>GC. This shows a slight variation from the results obtained in [42], which ranked JA>PB>GC>BC>CP. This could be explained by the fact that, books seem wider in circulation and usage than postgraduate dissertations especially in recent times.…”

“…The measurement of output of university academics has become very crucial in the overall evaluation of the performance of the university, and there is a strong relationship between academic research output and the overall development of a nation [3,42]. It is observed in [45] that university research is the society's largest source of knowledge and contributes immensely to wealth creation.…”

“…A number of authors have proposed criteria for evaluating research output. Lootsma and Bots [42] proposed that research output should be assessed under four distribution criteria, namely: the advancement of pure and applied scientific research, the advancement of innovative problem solving, the dissemination of scientific knowledge, and the coverage of average cost of research. Lopes and Lanzer [43] proposed the use of the following indicators: number of papers published in scientific journals, number of abstracts published, number of papers presented in international meetings, and number of books published including chapters and edits.…”

A multi-criteria framework for assessing scholarship based on Boyer's scholarship model

“…This is in agreement with a number of other studies, which placed very high priority on journal publication. For example, Uzoka [56] found journal > books > book chapters > conference proceedings > guidance and supervision; while Lootsma and Bots [37] had the following priority ranking: ranked journal article > published book > guidance and supervision > book contribution > and conference proceeding. There seems to be a strong agreement across disciplines that journal articles have a stronger weighting than all other forms of publication.…”

Assigning cardinal weights in multi‐criteria decision making based on ordinal ranking

“…Solymosi and Dompi (1985) and Barron (1992) propose rank order centroid weights. Lootsma (1999) and Lootsma and Bots (1999) suggest two types of geometric weights. All of these rankweight functions will be further discussed in Section 5, except the exponent weights and Lootsma and Bots (1999) geometric weights because they require extra input in addition to criteria ranks.…”