Project: Research Evaluation and Epistemic Change

The project addresses a long-standing question in Science Studies: How do evaluations of research by the state and by universities affect the content of research?

In response to the previous failure of many studies to answer this question, we will apply a new strategy of causal analysis. We adopt from political science the strategy of “causal reconstruction” (Mayntz). This approach starts from observable change – in our case: changes in the content of research – and traces the process leading to this change backwards to its causes. We ask if state and university evaluations are partial causes of changes in research content and look for other partial causes, most importantly the internal evaluation systems of scientific communities.

Establishing causality requires a comparative approach that reconstructs processes leading to different effects under different conditions. Specifically, we compare:

• the development of three innovations
• three different fields with field-specific internal evaluation systems
• three countries with different national evaluation systems