Minutes of the Journal Ranking Work Group in Geneva
by Wil Hout
The discussion in the workshop of the EADI Directors’ Meeting centred around two concrete examples of publications ranking. The first was the Ranking of Publications developed by the Netherlands Research School for Development Studies (CERES) over the past few years. This was introduced by Wil Hout, who represented CERES at the Meeting. The second example was the upcoming UK Research Assessment Exercise for Development Studies, on which Geof Wood from the University of Bath provided more detail.
Filip Reijntjens (University of Antwerp), who chairs the EADI committee on ranking, emphasised in the workshop that the EADI ranking list will serve a limited purpose: it will provide institutes with a Europe-wide list, focused on development studies, to rank publications (journal articles, book chapters, monographs, etc.). It will not be an attempt to evaluate individual researchers and/or research groups across Europe.
One aspect that featured very prominently in the discussion was the background of the whole exercise. People working in development studies institutes across Europe must be aware of the fact that the assessment criteria for research output in development studies are often stemming from other publication cultures, and are generally of monodisciplinary origin. Despite the fact that there may be questions as to the use and legitimacy of valuation schemes, development studies scholars must realise that it is in their best interest to develop transparent and credible mechanisms for publication assessment.
Several caveats were formulated in relation to the attempt at publications ranking. The first caveat was that the assessment tool will not likely be a perfect mathematical instrument, and that there will always be quite some scope for further (qualitative) interpretation. The second caveat was that the EADI publications ranking would not be intended to be a management tool for the evaluation of individual performance.
The conclusion of the workshop was that the attempt to arrive at an EADI-wide method of ranking was getting broad support. At the same time, it was also clear that any attempt should be based on broad consensus among EADI institutes before the valuation instrument could be used.
