International experts call for establishing indicators for measuring social impact of research
10 November 2007
65 experts on the social impact of research gathered in Amsterdam for ERiC’s international Expert meeting “Evaluation of productive interactions between science and society” on 9 November 2007. The meeting presented an overview of existing evaluation methods for the social impact of research, and called for establishing a minimum set of requirements for the methodological quality of measuring this impact.
The background of the meeting is the ongoing discussion about research in the context of the knowledge economy, in particular in the light of the concepts of ‘valorisation’ and the ‘knowledge paradox’. Policymakers, interested in which research is contributing best to the knowledge economy, demand from evaluation systems that they render results that make it possible to compare the research effort on a (supra)national level. Their main interest is establishing a set of relatively simple indicators, in order to make allocation decisions. On the other hand, there is an apparent need in many research communities and institutions to develop new evaluation methods that do more justice to the variegated goals and activities of researchers. In particular at the working level, it is felt that the focus of evaluation should be on the content of research, on goals and contextual relations, and thus on relevance and creativity of research instead of numbers. This dilemma was the central focus of the meeting. The meeting called upon the expertise of the participants to improve the level of coherence of the debate and further the mutual exchange of knowledge and expertise.
In a dynamic session called “The Practice”, seven short presentations were given on recently developed evaluation methods in different fields and in different organizational contexts. Based on this information, discussion took place on the future of evaluation of productive interactions on different levels: research group, discipline and (supra) national level. Professor Stefan Kuhlmann (University of Twente) concluded that there is a lot of experience to build upon. The next step should be to establish commonly accepted minimum requirements of methodological quality for the measurement of social impact, just as there is for the measurement of scientific quality. In order to reach this goal, the organizing project group ERiC (Evaluating Research in Context) intends to play an active role in this field. Its website will be used to present publications, a wiki on the evaluation of productive interactions will be built and there are plans to establish an international platform.
The expert meeting was organized by the Dutch project group ERiC (Evaluating Research in Context). Members are the COS (Consultative Committee of Sector Councils for Research and Development), HBO-raad (Association of the Universities of Applied Sciences), KNAW (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences), NWO (Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research), VSNU (Association of Universities in the Netherlands) and QANU Quality Assurance Netherlands Universities), whereas the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science and the Rathenau Institute are observers.
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