Zehra Taşkın
Zehra Taşkın is an Associate Professor in the Department of Information Management at Hacettepe University, Turkey. Additionally, she is a researcher at Adam Mickiewicz University Scholarly Communication Research Group in Poland. Her research interests primarily focus on research/performance evaluations and scholarly communication. Taşkın’s M.A. thesis addressed the issue of standardizing university affiliations in citation indexes, and her doctoral dissertation designed a content-based citation analysis model for the Turkish Language. Her works have been published in esteemed journals in information science, including the Journal of Informetrics, JASIS&T, QSS and Scientometrics. Taşkın has participated in several national and international projects funded by organizations such as the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange (NAWA Poland), NASA Astrobiology Institute, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Finnish Learned Societies, and TÜBİTAK (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey). She has also played an active role in the Libraries for Everyone project, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. She is the co-founder of the Scholarly Communication Network, which was established to support young researchers working in scholarly communication field. For more information, visit https://zehrataskin.com .
“Beyond the Numbers: Rethinking Research Performance Evaluations for Quality and Impact”
Researchers are often evaluated based on numerical metrics such as the number of publications and citations, the impact factor of the publication venue, the h-index of the researchers, and university rankings. However, the emphasis on numbers has resulted in a “publish or perish” culture and an uncontrollable number of scientific outputs that cannot be read by anyone. Additionally, relying solely on these metrics has created significant inequalities between researchers, disciplines, countries, and research topics. To address these challenges, we need to shift away from systems that prioritize numbers and instead develop new systems that focus on evaluating the quality and impact of research output. Numerical metrics can be useful for evaluating research performance, however, they should not be the sole criteria for deciding academic success. Instead, we need to develop more comprehensive evaluation systems that prioritize the societal and scientific impact of research. In this presentation, I will explore whether numerical evaluations can be replaced and discuss alternative ways to measure research quality.