Abstract
Nations the world over are increasingly turning to quantitative performance-based metrics to evaluate the quality of research outputs, as these metrics are abundant and provide an easy measure of ranking research. In 2010, the Danish Ministry of Science and Higher Education followed this trend and began portioning out a percentage of the available research funding according to how many research outputs each Danish university produces. Not all research outputs are eligible: only those published in a curated list of academic journals and publishers, the so-called BFI list, are included. The BFI list is ranked, which may create incentives for academic authors to target certain publication outlets or publication types over others. In this study we examine the potential effect these relatively new research evaluation methods have had on the publication patterns of researchers in Denmark. The study finds that publication behaviors in the Natural Sciences & Technology, Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) have changed, while the Health Sciences appear unaffected. Researchers in Natural Sciences & Technology appear to focus on high impact journals that reap more BFI points. While researchers in SSH have also increased their focus on the impact of the publication outlet, they also appear to have altered their preferred publication types, publishing more journal articles in the Social Sciences and more anthologies in the Humanities.
Highlights
Introduction and backgroundOver the last couple of decades, European Academia has experienced significant changes (Capano 2011; Olssen and Peters 2005)
The question is to what extent have Danish researchers changed their choice of publication type after the introduction of the BFI across the disciplines? this study examines changes in the number of research outputs produced for each publication type eligible for BFI points that can be traced over the investigated period
We investigated how the BFI may have changed the publication patterns of Danish researchers
Summary
Introduction and backgroundOver the last couple of decades, European Academia has experienced significant changes (Capano 2011; Olssen and Peters 2005). Influenced by New Public Management (NPM), new standards for quality assessment and control were developed (Lorenz 2012; Leišytė 2016). Many countries have implemented national performance-based university research funding systems (PRFS), making government funding of universities dependent on ex post evaluations of research output (Hicks 2012). By 2014, 15 of 28 member states of the European Union applied a PRFS (Jonkers and Zacharewicz 2016). Research productivity enters into performance-based funding models in some U.S states (see Rabovsky 2012, 2014). The purpose of the PRFS is to boost research quality and quantity (Hicks 2009). As well as to enhance the accountability, effectiveness and legitimacy of public spending on research (Whitley and Gläser 2007)
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