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.
Tatiana Fumasoli
Tatiana Fumasoli is Professor of Higher Education Studies at UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society, University College London, where she is the director of the UCL Centre for Higher Education Studies (CHES). Her research interests lie at the intersection between management studies, organisation theory and sociology of professions and expertise. Tatiana has led several international projects focusing on global governance, strategic management, and the academic profession. Her research activities investigate new practices of internationalisation, crisis management, and networks of innovation in teaching and learning. She is currently leading a World Bank funded project on internationalization and research governance for the Ministry of Education and Science in Georgia. Tatiana is the editor-in-chief of Higher Education Quarterly, a journal of SRHE Society for Research into Higher Education.
Research careers in the “knowledge society”: Role and contribution of higher education
The scholarship on doctoral education and researcher development reflects broader societal transformations, such as the emergence of the “knowledge society”, globalisation and internationalisation, marketisation. It also reflects the pressures that universities experience due to the increasing number of students and their heterogeneity. In parallel, universities’ role in knowledge production is being challenged by several stakeholders through demands for wider societal impact that goes beyond academia.
Against this backdrop, doctoral education and researcher development are being questioned on their purposes, organisation, pedagogical and learning experience, effective preparation of graduates for labour markets, partnerships with other societal sectors, and digital transformations. This presentation will highlight the unique role of universities in providing research training for the next generations of academics, as well as for highly skilled workers in contemporary economic sectors. It will also draw on recent research comparing different higher education systems and their competitiveness in enhancing national socio-economic development.