WoW! Wouter on the Web

Research performed at our universities is nowadays a heavily directed practice. Top down in most cases. Research for the sake of research has become a rare phenomenon. Research evaluations, research management and research organization are weeding out little pet projects on the side. Grant money and research funders are requesting concrete results of achievements and determine the objectives to be completed in advance.

It is therefore rather odd that in such a strongly organized and managed environment the organization of research itself is less subject of the academic discourse. I still remember my old professor who once insisted that “we didn’t need knowledge management since we produced knowledge”. That whilst after each completed PhD project another successful candidate left the organization with his knowledge written down in a number of articles and very seldom made explicit within the organization. That did not matter too much to him.

The researchers, research groups and graduate schools at universities in the Netherlands are regularly evaluated by external peer reviews. Productivity, Quality, Relevance and Vitality of the research are the main criteria on which groups are judged. It is odd however that very little study has been made of the underlying explanatory factors of successful groups versus less successful groups. I was therefore pleasantly surprised by an article of van der Weijden et al. (2008) who looked into some aspects of managerial control of research groups on their research performance.

An important shortcoming of their study was that the only bibliometric parameter they looked at was the number of papers produced in the journals covered by Web of Science. It really would have been useful if they had looked at normalized citation impact as one of their variables as well. Apart from the simple bibliometric measure of published peer reviewed articles they also looked at the success of the groups at the attainment of research grants etc.

Their most important finding was that:

“One internal research management activity was found to have a positive relationship with (bio)medical research performance in general. Offering special commendations to (bio)medical (both preclinical and clinical) research staff members, including non-financial prizes, in order to motivate them is positively related to all performance measures used in this study.”

Or in other words positive attention from the senior managers for what researchers were up to paid off really well.

From the more detailed conclusions another one struck me as very interesting as well:

“Different types of internally organized research evaluation practices have (linear) positive relationships with performance measures concerning external research funding. In preclinical groups pre-evaluations of research proposals have a positive relationship with these performance measures. Interestingly, in clinical groups, positive relationships are found with research output evaluations.”

Where in practice the external peer reviews are most often met with some degree of resistance. Well, criticism at least. It seems to be worth the effort invested by all participants into these kind of exercises.

Always good to realize this when our library is involved in the preparation of the peer review of six different graduate schools which involve about 1000 permanent staff and some 3000 researchers in total.

Reference:

van der Weijden, I., D. de Gilder, P. Groenewegen & E. Klasen. (2008). Implications of managerial control on performance of Dutch academic (bio)medical and health research groups Research Policy 37(9): 1616-1629 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2008.06.007 (subscription required).