The Evaluation of Research Activities as a System Process (based on the presentation)

Abstract

The features of research activities determining the specificity of approaches to their evaluation are highlighted. A critical analysis of the reforms in the domestic research sector under the auspices of the Ministry for Education and Science (MES) of Ukraine is made. It is argued that the evaluation reform in domestic research institutions has relied upon foreign patterns that are not quite so good because they do not account for the most progressive trends in the evaluation. The evaluation method of the MES of Ukraine is dominated by formal quantitative estimates, with the evaluation goal being to "derive" an integrated score estimate for all the institutions and to take it as the basis for their ranking, thus effectively confining a description of complex objects' activities to a single index. It is stressed that MES of Ukraine has been seeking to introduce the same indicators for evaluating individual researchers, institutions and research projects, but this approach ignores these objects' specifics. Besides that, by engaging in evaluations of individual researchers, MES of Ukraine seeks to take over the functions of higher education and research institutions, violating thereby the principle of academic freedom, which it is supposed to defend. The author believes that the performance of experts evaluating "overall" quantitative indicators needs to be enhanced through making stronger emphasis on the disciplinary dimension (citation level, number of authors per publication, etc.); avoiding baseless interdisciplinary comparisons, grouping of institutions by similarity of estimates without ranking by one ("composite") index; creating a monitoring system for main indicators of research activities, to use its data for verification of the reliability of expert assessments; inviting more external experts, especially from abroad.