What happens when national research funding is linked to differentiated publication counts? A comparison of the Australian and Norwegian publication-based funding models

Schneider, Jesper W.; Aagaard, Kaare; Bloch, Carter

doi:10.1093/reseval/rvv036

Cited by 42 publications

(35 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…An independent Danish team of researchers studied its design, organization, effects and legitimacy (Aagaard et al, 2014). As well as advising improvement and further development, the exercise provided the basis for four indepth studies of internationally relevant questions (Aagaard, 2015;Aagaard et al, 2015;Schneider et al, 2015;Bloch and Schneider, 2016). Since 2014, the funded and funding organizations have collaborated on following up the evaluation to improve the model and its practices.…”

Section: Indicator-based Funding: the Norwegian Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Unique, but still best practice? The Research Excellence Framework (REF) from an international perspective

Sivertsen

2017

Palgrave Commun

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Inspired by The Metric Tide report (2015) on the role of metrics in research assessment and management, and Lord Nicholas Stern's report Building on Success and Learning from Experience (2016), which deals with criticisms of REF2014 and gives advice for a redesign of REF2021, this article discusses the possible implications for other countries. It also contributes to the discussion of the future of the REF by taking an international perspective. The article offers a framework for understanding differences in the motivations and designs of performance-based research funding systems (PRFS) across countries. It also shows that a basis for mutual learning among countries is more needed than a formulation of best practice, thereby both contributing to and correcting the international outlook in The Metric Tide report and its supplementary Literature Review.

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Section: Indicator-based Funding: the Norwegian Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Unique, but still best practice? The Research Excellence Framework (REF) from an international perspective

Sivertsen

2017

Palgrave Commun

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“…While others (Beerkens, 2013;Worthington & Lee, 2008) have restricted the analyses to paper productivity, Marinova and Newman (2008) also found a considerable increase in citations. 3 Recently, Schneider et al (2016) confirmed part of Butler's findings, notably the lowering of the average impact of journals, using instead of JIF a method for normalization of a journal's impact to the mean of the journal categories where Australian researchers published their papers after the change of funding system.…”

Section: A Discussion About Evaluation Regimesmentioning

confidence: 82%

Perverse effects of output-based research funding? Butler’s Australian case revisited

Besselaar

Heyman

Sandström

2017

Journal of Informetrics

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a b s t r a c tMore than ten years ago, Linda Butler (2003a) published a well-cited article claiming that the Australian science policy in the early 1990s made a mistake by introducing output based funding. According to Butler, the policy stimulated researchers to publish more but at the same time less good papers, resulting in lower total impact of Australian research compared to other countries. We redo and extend the analysis using longer time series, and show that Butlers' main conclusions are not correct. We conclude in this paper (i) that the currently available data reject Butler's claim that "journal publication productivity has increased significantly. . . but its impact has declined", and (ii) that it is hard to find such evidence also with a reconstruction of her data. On the contrary, after implementing evaluation systems and performance based funding, Australia not only improved its share of research output but also increased research quality, implying that total impact was greatly increased. Our findings show that if output based research funding has an effect on research quality, it is positive and not negative. This finding has implications for the discussions about research evaluation and about assumed perverse effects of incentives, as in those debates the Australian case plays a major role.

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“…When Ben Martin in this issue concludes that the study of Linda Butler is more convincing than ours, this is more than expected: in contrast to our findings, Butler's results do fit in his expectations -even if they are empirically wrong. That also holds for Aagaard and Schneider (this issue; see also Schneider et al, 2016), who also do not see that Butler's conclusions are wrong, although they present the evidence for that (Van den Besselaar and Sandström, in press). Our commenters seem to prefer to keep the wrong belief alive.…”

Section: The Role Of Background Knowledgementioning

confidence: 79%

Do observations have any role in science policy studies? A reply

Besselaar

Heyman

Sandström

2017

Journal of Informetrics

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What happens when national research funding is linked to differentiated publication counts? A comparison of the Australian and Norwegian publication-based funding models

Cited by 42 publications

References 15 publications

Unique, but still best practice? The Research Excellence Framework (REF) from an international perspective

Unique, but still best practice? The Research Excellence Framework (REF) from an international perspective

Perverse effects of output-based research funding? Butler’s Australian case revisited

Do observations have any role in science policy studies? A reply

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