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Metric systems
What are the alternatives to university rankings in assessing research ? – opinion
By Ginny Barbour and Martin Betts
Global efforts to find new ways to assess research quality have been underway for more than 10 years now , with the Declaration on Research Assessment ( DORA ) celebrating its 10th anniversary in May 2023 .
This initiative and other related ones such as the Leiden Manifesto and the Hong Kong Principles have sought to show that there are better ways of assessing research and researchers than current ranking systems , which are often commercially owned .
DORA also highlights that , regardless of who makes the measurements , we need assessments of research publication quality that are sensitive to discipline differences and which support different research goals and objectives .
Many would argue that university rankings are equally inappropriate in assessing diverse missions of universities and their broader purposes beyond research .
The arguments would be that they do so for the same underlying reason of suiting the purposes of commercial gain by ranking companies and publishers .
What about the matters that are important to the experiences of staff and students and university partners ? How many rankings measure staff culture and feelings of safety on campus ? How many rankings genuinely measure and include what we all say is important – that we value the student experience ?
Research value , and its importance to our society , arises in part from its diversity in focus and approach and its ability to address a broad range of questions .
If we subject research value to narrow and prescribed ways of measuring and assessing it , we are in danger of restricting breadth of enquiry , discriminating between approaches to pursuing it , and introducing motives for gaming of the system .
Some of the biggest challenges to research exploration have come from systems restricting inter-disciplinarity and assessing impact .
Early journals that celebrated inter-disciplinarity and open access ,
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