Project: Research Evaluation and Epistemic Change

Aim

There has been a long-standing interest in how national governance evaluation systems (evaluations institutionalised by research policy or research management) affect the content of research. However, proving such influence turned out to be notoriously difficult due to both methodological weaknesses and to unsuitable approaches to causal analysis in previous research. The aim of our project is to overcome these weaknesses of previous research and to identify the causal contribution of external evaluations to changes in research content by using a new approach to causal analysis.

We adopt from political science "causal reconstruction" (Mayntz) or "Explaining-Outcome Process-Tracing" (Beach and Pedersen), an approach to causal analysis that starts from observable change - in our case: changes in the content of research – and traces the processes producing it backwards to the partial causes of such change. We investigate scientific innovations as processes that bring about lasting epistemic change in the sciences, social sciences and humanities. These processes are driven by researchers' decisions to work in new research directions.

Starting from a specific observable epistemic change, we can examine how governance evaluation systems have facilitated or hindered innovation processes as partial causes of epistemic change. We include the epistemic evaluation systems of scientific communities – the constant mutual evaluations by community members - as another known partial cause of epistemic change.

Specifically, we compare

• the development of three innovations
• in three different fields with different research practices
• in three countries with different national governance and evaluation systems