Steering effects of research evaluation on SSH early career researchers

Abstract

There is an increasing interest in academic and policy communities on the societal impact of research in order to maximise the social benefits created by public investments in science (Muhonen et al., 2019). As part of that, it is becoming increasingly evaluated in an attempt to create the right incentives for scientists to steer academics to deliver this improved efficiency (Sivertsen, 2017). But those evaluation processes have raced ahead of the understandings of the way that research creates impact (Donovan, 2017). Bonaccorsi (2018) points out that this risks making a fairly fundamental epistemic error that fails to capture a diversity of working practices in different scientific disciplines that do not correspond to these common sense evaluation models used in policy and practice, such as in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) (see also Benneworth et al., 2016). This raises a prima facie case that societal impact evaluation of research might be producing adverse effects in the academy, that these problems might be being disproportionately borne by SSH: it is this problematic that we address in this paper.