Abstract
AbstractWith the growing complexity of societal and scientific problems, research centers have emerged to facilitate the conduct of research beyond disciplinary and institutional boundaries. While they have become firmly established in the global university landscape, research centers raise some critical questions for research evaluation. Existing evaluation approaches designed to assess universities, departments, projects, or individual researchers fail to capture some of the core characteristics of research centers and their participants, including the diversity of the involved researchers, at what point in time they join and leave the research center, or the intensity of their participation. In addressing these aspects, this article introduces an advanced approach for the ex post evaluation of research centers. It builds on a quasi-experimental within-group design, bibliometric analyses, and multilevel statistics to assess average and individual causal effects of research center affiliation on participants along three dimensions of research performance. The evaluation approach is tested with archival data from a center in the field of sustainability science. Against a widely held belief, we find that participation in research centers entails no disadvantages for researchers as far as their research performance is concerned. However, individual trajectories varied strongly.
Highlights
Research centers have evolved into indispensable organizational instruments in the university landscape (Ikenberry and Friedman 1972; Rivers and Gray 2013; Smith et al 2016)
We introduced with this study a theoretically and methodologically refined approach for the ex post evaluation of research centers
The statistical approach is quite comprehensive, as it allows the average causal effects to be assessed and accounts for the individual causal effects (ICEs), cohort effects, micro and macro effects of research center participation, as well as whether the effect on the research performance of the participant is restricted to the research center context or beyond
Summary
Research centers have evolved into indispensable organizational instruments in the university landscape (Ikenberry and Friedman 1972; Rivers and Gray 2013; Smith et al 2016). Research centers operate at the interface of conflicting research policy developments: On the one hand, universities are increasingly encouraged by funding entities to conduct solution-oriented research to tackle the grand societal challenges like climate change, energy supply, or urbanization. Those applied research questions require collaboration across disciplinary boundaries and have led to an increased emergence of inter- and transdisciplinary research centers (Kueffer et al 2012; SDSN 2017). The academic ‘publish or perish’ system rewards efficiency in terms of individual research performance, which, given the coordination effort associated to inter- and transdisciplinary research, very often results in disciplinary and highly focused basic research (Talwar, Wiek and Robinson 2011; Lang et al 2012; Wiek et al 2014).
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