Stefanie Haustein, Vincent Larivière
« The Use of Bibliometrics for Assessing Research: Possibilities, Limitations and Adverse Effects »
I.M. Welpe, J. Wollersheim, S. Ringelhan, M. Osterloh (dir.) Incentives and Performance. Governance of Research Organizations. Springer (2015) pp. 121-139.
Abstract
Researchers are used to being evaluated: publications, hiring, tenure and funding decisions are all based on the evaluation of research. Traditionally, this evaluation relied on judgement of peers but, in the light of limited resources and increased bureaucratization of science, peer review is getting more and more replaced or complemented with bibliometric methods. Central to the introduction of bibliometrics in research evaluation was the creation of the Science Citation Index (SCI) in the 1960s, a citation database initially developed for the retrieval of scientific information. Embedded in this database was the Impact Factor, first used as a tool for the selection of journals to cover in the SCI, which then became a synonym for journal quality and academic prestige. Over the last 10 years, this indicator became powerful enough to influence researchers’ publication patterns in so far as it became one of the most important criteria to select a publication venue. Regardless of its many flaws as a journal metric and its inadequacy as a predictor of citations on the paper level, it became the go-to indicator of research quality and was used and misused by authors, editors, publishers and research policy makers alike. The h-index, introduced as an indicator of both output and impact combined in one simple number, has experienced a similar fate, mainly due to simplicity and availability. Despite their massive use, these measures are too simple to capture the complexity and multiple dimensions of research output and impact. This chapter provides an overview of bibliometric methods, from the development of citation indexing as a tool for information retrieval to its application in research evaluation, and discusses their misuse and effects on researchers’ scholarly communication behavior.

The Task Force on Federal Regulation of Higher Education has done an outstanding job of describing the ways in which regulation of higher education has become too costly, too complex, and too burdensome and of providing specific recommendations for reform. When regulations are excessive, contradictory, or duplicative, they not only take resources away from the education, research, and service missions of universities but also add to the cost of tuition. More...

The undersigned higher education associations support narrowly tailored legislative efforts to rein in the abusive litigation practices of patent trolls. Universities have no sympathy for those who abuse the patent system to extract unjust and sometimes exorbitant settlements. Unfortunately, the Innovation Act is not narrowly tailored. It is instead so broad that it would have the unintended consequence of debilitating the U.S. patent system, which is critical to the nation’s economy. More...

The higher education community has anxiously awaited the release of more specific information about the Postsecondary Institution Ratings System (PIRS) since President Obama announced the proposal in August 2013. The goals articulated by the President – enhanced access to accurate, timely and actionable consumer information and strengthened institutional accountability for the receipt of public funds – are laudable ideals that we strongly support. Our concerns with PIRS, therefore, are not with the purposes motivating the effort, but instead with the feasibility of the approach and the serious danger of unintended consequences.
In view of the Administration’s stated goal of implementing PIRS by the start of the 2015-2016 academic year, we had hoped that the framework unveiled in December 2014 would provide a concrete and sufficiently specific presentation of the Department’s proposed approach to allow institutions to evaluate the plan’s strengths and weaknesses and to assess its likely impact. Unfortunately, the document released on December 19th is so incomplete, tentative, and amorphous, that it is impossible to offer the type of critique that this undertaking would otherwise require.
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L'Université Nationale de Singapour (NUS, [1]) avec 9 autres universités sous l'Alliance of Research Universities (IARU, [2]), a collaboré avec le groupe de réflexion scandinave Sustainia [3] pour développer un Guide Vert pour les Universités. Ce guide partage des idées pour faciliter la transition des universités vers des établissements verts.
L'analyse présente 23 études de cas et d'interventions prospères dans les domaines environnementaux, financiers et sociaux, ainsi que les meilleures pratiques durables déjà en place à NUS, l'Université de Yale [4], l'Université de Californie à Berkeley [5], l'Université de Cambridge [6], l'Université de Copenhague [7], l'Université de Pékin [8], l'Université de Tokyo [9], l'Université Nationale Australienne [10], l'ETH Zurich [11] et l'Université d'Oxford [12].
Le guide est en téléchargement gratuit [13].
- [1] NUS : http://nus.edu.sg/
- [2] IARU : http://www.iaruni.org/
- [3] Sustainia : http://www.sustainia.me/
- [4] Université de Yale : http://www.yale.edu/
- [5] Université de Californie à Berkeley : http://berkeley.edu/
- [6] Université de Cambridge : http://www.cam.ac.uk/
- [7] Université de Copenhague : http://www.ku.dk/
- [8] Université Pékin : http://english.pku.edu.cn/
- [9] Université de Tokyo : http://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/
- [10] Université National Australienne : http://www.anu.edu.au/
- [11] ETH Zurich : https://www.ethz.ch/de.html
- [12] Université d'Oxford : http://www.ox.ac.uk/
- [13] Téléchargement du Guide : http://redirectix.bulletins-electroniques.com/A6VRG. Voir l'article...

By Tobias Schulze-Cleven. Over the past two decades, public higher education has become widely recognized for its contribution to socio-economic adjustment. This paper probes its evolution in two large and affluent democracies, the United States and Germany, whose higher education systems represent distinct ideal types. The analysis argues that public authorities in both countries have liberalized their systems to spur innovation in the provision of higher education. Yet a broad convergence in associated market expansion has coincided with divergence in its modes and consequences. Tracing how the two countries’ policy regimes have created path-dependent trajectories of reform, the paper contends that the institutions associated with each state’s inherited role in higher education – “enabling” in the US and “constitutive” in Germany – have empowered different social groups to shape state action. Under the influence of investors and managers, institutional drift and conversion have pushed public higher education toward corporatization in the United States. In contrast, interventions by faculty and students have moderated the effects of institutional displacement and layering on the German system’s stratification. Given the sector’s growing importance, this analysis carries important implications for the comparative study of capitalist evolution.
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FROM SOFT POWER TO ECONOMIC DIPLOMACY? A Comparison Of The Changing Rationales And Roles Of The U. S. And Canadian Federal Governments In International Education
By Roopa Desai Trilokekar. Through a historical and comparative analysis of international education policy development in Canada and the U.S., this paper will map the similarities and differences in the two countries. It will highlight the contributions and challenges of the government’s involvement in international education (IE) in the two federal states and in particular, explore the implications of the changing contexts, rationales and approaches for international education to the federal role in higher education. It will conclude with observations on the differential impact of the federal government’s role in international/higher education on the higher education systems of the two countries and thus contribute to our understanding of how national specificities and characteristics outweigh the commonly stated policy rationales, approaches and outcomes for international education.
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By Marijk van der Wende. The global competition and related international academic mobility in science and research is rising. Within this context, Europe faces quantitative skills shortages, including an estimate of between 800,000 and one million researchers. Within Europe skills imbalances and mismatches increase, with a growing divergence between countries and regions, in particular between the North and South, in terms of their ability to invest and attract human and financial capital for R&D. As a result intra-European mobility is not only on the rise, but may easily turn from an intended brain circulation into a brain drain – brain gain situation. From a qualitative perspective solutions to the skills shortages and imbalances relevant to science and innovation require the training of a broad mix of skills, which is currently provided to only in a minority of students in European higher education institutions and programmes.  Will the intra-European flows of human and financial capital for R&D result in a further concentration of the minds in a limited number of regions or hubs in Europe? Is this (un)avoidable or (un)desirable? The further concentration of talent appears to be Europe’s fate. These forces play out quite differently across the various disciplinary fields. In general the “STEM fields” (including engineering, natural, life and medical sciences) are already most internationalized and especially their experimental branches require the highest concentration of financial and human resources for large-scale and high-tech research infrastructure. The current combination of mobility and funding flows and trends seems to cause an increasing concentration of especially high-tech research capacity (in the natural and life sciences) in a limited number of regional hubs, which is likely to the detriment of the broad comprehensive profile of universities in certain weaker regions and countries in Europe. Those institutions may have to choose more specialized profiles, focusing more on less (human and financial) capital-intensive fields in the social sciences and the humanities.
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By Torberg Falch and Justina A.V. Fisch. Student achievement has been identified as an important contributor to economic growth. This paper investigates the relationship between redistributive government activities and investment in human capital measured by student performance in international comparative tests in Mathematics and Science during the period 1980 to 2003. In fixed effects panel models, government consumption, government social expenditures, and the progressivity of the income tax system have negative effects on student achievement. These results are robust to a variety of model specifications, such as conditioning on educational expenditures, and alternative measures of student performance from the World Bank. Our estimates indicate that increased government size by 10 percent reduces student achievement by 0.1 standard deviations. Download Welfare state generosity and student performance.

La confusion la plus grande semble régner au sujet du budget 2015 des universités. En novembre-décembre, lors de la préparation du budget, on a assisté à une valse des chiffres, en baisse, puis en hausse, puis de nouveau en baisse … au point que je ne sais sincèrement plus où on en est sur les chiffres réels (sans compter les doubles affichages dans les programmes de type PIA, CPER ou autre artifice). Si quelqu’un a les idées claires sur la situation aujourd’hui, je veux bien un petit résumé. Voir l'article...