A Generic Benchmarking Approach for Research Area Output: Is Responsible Investment a Researcherrs Stepchild?

Abstract

We contribute to the research policy literature by pioneering the development of a sufficiently reliable and generically applicable benchmarking approach for research area output quantity and/or quality. In our development, we overcome substantial structural problems such as the ignorance of books and monographs or the inconsistent citation behaviour differences between research areas. Our approach offers various new opportunities to stakeholders of the research process. For instance, governments, research funding bodies or researchers could benefit from a traffic light system for research area performance and competitiveness, which universities could also use for strategic decision making on their national research assessment submissions. We illustrate our approach for the interdisciplinary research area of responsible investment, which is backed by a trillion $ industry, and find it to experience under-proportional aggregated (quality weighted) research output. This signals to governments, which already legislatively support responsible investment, the need for additional research support and to researchers a less competitive but relevant research area.