Call for papers

Presenters: Gareth O’Neil, Andrea Mannocci, Clifford Tatum, and Elizabeth Gadd
Chairs: Clara Calero and Ludo Waltman
Technical support: Zeynep Anli

Introduction
OPUS is an EU-funded project that aims to help reform research assessment toward a system that incentivises researchers to practice open science. GraspOS is another closely related EU-funded project. It aims to pave the way toward open-science-aware responsible research assessment and to deliver an open infrastructure for metrics and indicators that support modern research evaluation practices. As OPUS and GraspOS teams, we are joining forces by proposing to jointly organise a special session at the STI 2023 conference.

Topic and aims of the special session
The topic of this special session is research(er) evaluation at the interface of open science and responsible research assessment. This topic is at the heart of the OPUS and the GraspOS projects. It also relates directly to two of the core topics of the STI 2023 conference: open science practices and reform of research evaluation practices. These topics represent key areas of attention in ongoing policy discussions and emerging implementation initiatives, both in Europe and worldwide. We expect many of the conference participants to be interested in these discussions and the ongoing work in the OPUS and GraspOS projects. The proposed special session aims to inform conference participants about the ongoing work in the OPUS and GraspOS projects, solicit their feedback on this work, and invite them to get more closely involved by joining the communities of practice of the projects. Special attention will be given to the relationship between open science on the one hand and responsible research assessment on the other hand. Both represent powerful reform movements and, to a significant
extent, their agendas appear to align and mutually reinforce each other. Nevertheless, early observations of the teams working in both projects suggest that careful coordination between the two movements is needed to avoid the risk of tensions since, in some cases, their objectives may not be fully aligned (e.g., excessive focus on openness might draw attention away from other important issues in research assessment).

Format of the special session
This special session will feature speakers from the OPUS and GraspOS projects. In addition, we will invite a member of the steering board of the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) to discuss how the projects can help members of CoARA to implement the commitments in the Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment. The special session will have an interactive format that offers ample opportunity for discussion with the speakers. Online participation will also be facilitated. We plan to use real-time polls (e.g., using Mentimeter) to maximise engagement with the audience.

Presenters: Angelika Tsivinskaya, Kaja Wendt, and Alessandro Avenali
Chair: Carey Ming-Li Chen

Academic careers in sociology and peer recognition

Temporary employment in the Norwegian higher education sector

The Heterogeneity of Non-academic Staff and its Relationships with the Performance of European and US Universities

Presenters: Puck van der Wouden and Nuria Bautista-Puig
Chair: Ed Noyons

Does research intensity reflect dental care demand?

The participation of public in knowledge production: a citizen science projects overview

Presenters: Mazen El Makkouk, Valentin Mulder, and Wencelao Arroyo-Machado
Chair: Angelo Salatino

Adding humanities and social science publications to Wikidata: a contribution to the Open Science movement

Capturing Trends Using OpenAlex and Wikipedia Page Views as Science Indicators: The Case of Data Protection and Encryption Technologies

Do popular research topics attract the most social attention? A first proposal based on OpenAlex and Wikipedia

Presenters: Theresa Burscher and Nico Pintar
Chair: Thomas Scherngell

Potentials for reducing spatial inequalities in innovation: A spatial econometric perspective

The impact of knowledge complexity on total factor productivity in European metropolitan regions

Presenters: Maria-Theresa Norn, Thed van Leeuwen, and Chantal Ripp
Chair: Marc Luwel

Four archetypes of Open Science Partnerships: Connecting aims and means in open research collaborations

Gold Open Access output and expenditures in the United States in the past decade

Roadmap for Open Science: An analysis of open science action plans by Canadian federal science departments

Presenters: Pengfei Jia, Yifei Yu, and Yiwen Tang
Chair: Alfredo Yegros

Landscape of intellectual property protection in plant varieties: From a network view

Non-unilateral patents: A novel indicator for assessing innovation performance

Tracing the Evolution Patterns of Patent Cooperation: Taking the OECD Members and Their Key Partners as a Case Study

Presenters: Lorena Delgado Quirós, Thomas Scheidsteger, Jose de Melo Maricato, and Angel Borrego
Chair: Rodrigo Costas

Comparing bibliographic descriptions in seven free-access databases

How similar are field-normalized scores from different free or commercial databases calculated for large German universities?

SciELO as an open scientometric research infrastructure: general discussion of coverage in OpenAlex, WoS, Scopus and Dimensions

Social Sciences and Humanities research funded under the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (2007-2013): the challenge of retrieving its scholarly outputs

Presenters: Abhiru Nandy, Marc Luwel, Ioanna Grypari, and Rik Iping
Chair: Robin Haunschild

An Expertise-based Framework for Research Portfolio Management of Institutions at coarse- and fine-grained levels

Analyzing the use of email addresses in scholarly publications

Project IntelComp: AI-assisted Research and Innovation Policy-Making

The development and application of a bibliometric strength, potential and risk analysis for research strategy in a University Medical Center

Presenters: Sotaro Shibayama, Henrique Pinheiro, Gege Lin, and Ross Potter
Chair: Vincent Traag

Measuring Risk in Science

Normalization of rare citation events in the context of uptake of research in the non-scientific literature

Quantifying citation inflation: measurement methods and their implications for research evaluation

The growth of international collaboration: Collaboration Category Normalised Citation Impact (Collab CNCI) and implications for responsible research evaluation

Presenters: Jochen Glazer, Peter van den Besselaar, Kevin Boyack, and Rudiger Mutz
Chair: Jesper Schneider

A local cohesion-maximising algorithm for the exploration of publication networks

Field Effects in Predicting Exceptional Growth in Research Communities

Measuring disruptiveness and continuity of research by using the Disruption Index (DI) – A Bayesian statistical approach

Bibliometric indicators as items

Presenters: Angelo Salatino, Kamila Lewandowska, and Natalija Todorovic
Chair: Sybille Hinze

Diversity of Expertise is Key to Scientific Impact: a Large-Scale Analysis in the Field of Computer Science

From STEM to STEAM? Exploring the connections between Arts and Sciences

Topics, Communities, and Diversity. Overlaying Cognitive and Social Dimensions in Argumentation Studies

Presenters: Kathrine Bjerg Bennike and Poul Melchiorsen, Eleanora Dagiene, Juergen Wastl, and Dmitry Kochetkov
Chair: James Wilsdon

An institutional implementation of the new European reform of research assessment

Multi-actor policy dynamics in research evaluation: The introduction of international standards of excellence

The reform of evaluation procedures in research assessment: The positioning of the societal impact of research within research assessment – an interim analysis

Why shouldn’t university rankings be used to evaluate research and researchers?

Presenters: Xin Liu, Mayline Strouk, and Julia Melkers
Chair: Renate Reitsma

Distance matters: The causal effect of coauthor mobility on scientific collaboration

Following those who follow seabirds. Mapping collaborations in the field using a mixed-method approach

Social innovation for resilience in international collaborative research

Presenters: Ligia Ernesto, Ekaterina Dyachenko, and Nikki Vermeulen
Chair: Robert Tijssen

How networked are Medical Schools? Evidence from Portugal

Internationalisation of Russian medical research – its main drivers and future prospects through the lens of publications

Evaluating international strategic partnerships between universities

Presenters: Philippe Gorry, Jiang Li, Rong Ni, and Hendrik Karlstrom
Chair: Zohreh Zahedi

Analysis of the Pubmed Commons Post-Publication Peer Review Platform

Is the acceptance time shorter for submission with preprints?

To Preprint or Not to Preprint: Experience and Attitudes of Researchers Worldwide

To what extent has open access (OA) publishing benefited researchers in lower-income countries? A global analysis of reference patterns 1980-2020

Presenters: Jochem Zuijderwijk, Carter Bloch, and Benedetto Lepori
Chair: Ronald Rousseau

Exploring the evaluation of inter- and transdisciplinary research proposals: Lessons from Dutch research funding reform

Promoting the societal impact of research funding

What is a research Infrastructure? Commonalities and differences across science and policy, from mega-science to shared facilities

Presenters: Jian Wang and Chun Li Liu
Chair: Eric James Iversen

Comparing patent front-page and in-text references to science

Measuring the science-technology-innovation linkage and its evolution based on citation and text features of FDA-approved drugs-patents-papers

Presenters: Annika Just, Juan Carlos Castillo, Juil Kim, and Nicolau Duran-Silva
Chair: Kathleen Gregory

Towards building a monitoring platform for a challenge-oriented smart specialisation with RIS3-MCAT

On epistemic properties and field-specific logics in the study of knowledge transfer: Empirical evidence on researchers’ productive interactions from a nationwide survey in Germany

Synergies across Innovations Obstacles and the Role of Government Aid: Evidence from Chile

The Potential of Meta-Analysis for Evidence-based Innovation Policy: Three Research Cases in the South Korean Context

Presenters: Andre Brasil, Taekho You, and Raf Guns
Chair: Daniel Hook

Between Bibliometrics and Peer Review: The Evolution and Challenges of Brazil’s Qualis System

Impact Factor polarization during the COVID-19 pandemic

Journal metrics as predictors of Research Excellence Framework 2021 results: Comparison of impact factor quartiles and Finnish expert-ratings

Presenters: Otto Auranen, Carlos Vílchez-Román, and Mark Simard
Chair: Benedetto Lepori

Comparing Finnish universities’ publication profiles using multidimensional field-normalized indicators

Scientific leadership and collaboration can predict the academic popularity of highly-cited university’s publications indexed in WoS from an Andean country

Worldwide trends in brain research: A bibliometric analysis

Presenters: Andrey Guskov, Kuniko Matsumoto, and Maria Henkel
Chair: Soohong Eum

Country shifts in the authorship of conference papers

Geographical distribution of high-novelty research

Who studies whom? An Analysis of Geo-Contextualized Sustainable Development Goal Research

Presenters: Mathias Wullum Nielsen, Luyu Du, Richard Woolley, and Huilin Ge
Chair: Jonathan Dudek

Gendered trajectories in (early-career) international research mobility: mobility prospects and career impact

Higher Productivity and Lower Work Satisfaction? Work-family Conflict of Foreign-born versus US-born Faculty

International mobility and career progression of European academics

On the relationship between previous international collaboration and international mobility of scientific researchers

Presenters: Dimity Stephen, Leslie McIntosh, and Tang Li
Chair: Carole de Bordes

Distinguishing articles in questionable and non-questionable journals using quantitative indicators associated with quality

Research Integrity Indicators in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Research misconduct investigations in China’s science funding system

Presenters: Malik Salami, Er-Te Zheng, and Xiang Zheng
Chair: Zohreh Zahedi

Do men commit more scientific misconduct than women? Evidence from retracted articles

The effectiveness of peer review in identifying issues leading to retractions

Assessing the agreement in retraction indexing across 4 multidisciplinary sources: Crossref, Retraction Watch, Scopus, and Web of Science

Presenters: Shuying Chen, Marion Maisonobe, and Frederique Bordignon
Chair: Zohreh Zahedi

What does it mean to correct the scientific record? A case study of the JACS (2000-2023)

Retraction Practices and Effects: A Characterization and Quantification Study of Retraction Notice

The Geography of Retracted Papers: Showcasing a Crossref-Dimensions-NETSCITY Pipeline for the Spatial Analysis of Bibliographic Data

Presenters: Hans Jonker, Biegzat Murat, and Robin Haunschild
Chair: Stephen Pinfield

A first snapshot of academics’ media mentions and policy citations in Flanders Belgium

Exploratory analysis of policy document sources in Altmetric.com and Overton

How relevant is public policy and administration research for the policy sector? An empirical analysis based on Overton data

Presenters: Cibele Aguiar, Cornelia Lawson, and dangqiang Ye
Chair: Andrew Plume

How can altmetrics improve the Public Communication of Science and Technology? An analysis on universities and altmetrics

LinkedIn use by academics: an indicator for science policy and research?

WeChat Presence of Chinese Scholarly Journal: An Analysis of CSCD-indexed Journals

Presenters: Autumn Toney, Remi Toupin, and Nicolas Robinson-Garcia
Chair: Philippe Mongeon

Impacts of Social Media Sentiments on Retractions of Scholarly Literature

Public attention to research on Twitter through storytelling: making a narrative out of tweets to a scientific article

Tweet my paper: Who handles dissemination on Twitter?

Presenters: Ashraf Maleki, Madelaine Hare, and Daniel Torres-Salinas
Chair: Natalija Todorovic

Do original tweets and retweets differ in indicating research impact across various subject areas in multidisciplinary papers published in PLoS?

Do You Cite What You Tweet? Contextualizing the Tweet-Citation Relationship

The Elon Musk Paradox: Quantifying the Presence and Impact of Twitter Bots on Altmetrics with Focus in Social Sciences

Presenters: Thomas Klebel, Kathleen Gregory, and Theresa Velden
Chair: Clara Calero Medina

Modelling the effect of funding selectivity on the uptake of data sharing in the academic community

Rewarding data sharing and reuse: Initial results of an interview study

The Field-Specificity of Open Data Practices

Presenters: Andrew Herman, Jing Wang, and Jens-Peter Andersen
Chair: André Brasil

Editorial gatekeeping up and down the journal hierarchy

The journal attention economy in China

Through the Secret Gate: A Study of Member-Contributed Submissions in PNAS

Presenters: Victoria Pham, Daniel Torres-Salinas, Ozgur Ozer, and Alexander Schniedermann
Chair: Inge van der Weijden

Academic Elitism: Parental Education and the Career Experiences of Faculty in U.S. Institutions

The academic age of researchers by SDG and region – in which region more early career researchers are needed to advance SDGs related science?

The relationship between academic seniority and scientific production at the organisational level

Who writes what? The academic age patterns of review genres in biomedicine

Presenters: Thamyres Choji, Soohong Eum, and Natalija Matveeva
Chair: Laurens Hessels

Funding projects for Spanish public universities in research, development, and innovation related areas: Implications for resource allocation and scientific investment

Thematic research funding and the entry of researchers into prioritized areas: the case of green energy technology in Korea

Who Funds Whom? An Exploratory Survey of Top Journal Papers of the Small Post-Soviet Countries

Presenters: Yohanna Juk, Torger Möller, and Elena Chechik
Chair: Inge van der Weijden

Diversity, equity and inclusion: how funding agencies are addressing inequalities in research

Do female academics submit fewer grant applications than men?

Gender, Parenthood, and Academic Performance: Work-life and Work-work Balance in Russian Academia

Henry Small

Eugene Garfield Memorial Lecture: Exploring the Past and Charting the Future of Co-citation. After the lecture there will be a cocktail reception.

• Assessing the Knowledge and Attitudes of Spanish Early-Stage Academics towards Predatory Journals
• Availability of raw data in Spanish cancer research
• BRIDGE Theory: A New Method Combining Quantitative and Qualitative Evaluation
• Can tweets predict article retractions?
• Commissioned public R&D publications in the social sciences. A document analysis of societal impacts of research
• Diagnosis on the implementation of open science in Spanish institutions. Analysis of projects, publications and perception of stakeholders
• How researchers collaborate across disciplines? Patterns of interdisciplinary collaboration based on a dual-perspective framework
• International University Rankings and Changing University Functions: Underlining indicators to capture societal and entrepreneurial contributions of universities
• Leadership and international scientific collaboration in COVID-19 research: bridging the North-South divide?
• Mapping the Narrow Reproducibility Discourse
• Measuring Data Re-Use Through Dataset Citations in OpenAlex
• Measuring scientific creativity for science and technology evaluation in the age of AI: why is it possible?
• Open access and research evaluation: first evidence from the Italian National Evaluation of Research Quality (VQR)
• Open Science Indicators: Trends in preprint, data, and code sharing, 2019-2022
• Open science practices at scientific institutions: the case of Poland
• Retractions, retracted articles and withdrawals coverage in scholarly databases
• The Journal Observatory – Connecting information on scholarly communication
• Understanding the support of metrics: the role of orientation to Global Science in sociologists’ perceptions of performance measurement
• Who reviews for interdisciplinary research? A Study based on Active Reviewers from Publons

Tung Tung Chan, Elizabeth Gadd, William Bramwell, and Ludo Waltman

The global university rankings have become an established, if highly contested, part of the HE landscape. There have been significant critiques of the use of substandard data sources, poorly constructed reputation surveys and other invalid indicators, all arbitrarily weighted into a composite measure of university ‘quality’ arrayed in a single ranking, often without any attempt at error measurement. Despite their limitations they are heavily relied upon by students, faculty and policy-makers alike for decision making and both governments and institutions make considerable investments in seeking to improve their ranking performance. However, in recent months there have been a number of policy developments that are likely to affect future engagement with global rankings.

In July 2022 an international coalition of stakeholders led by the European University Association (EUA), Science Europe and European Commission published the Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment. One of the four core commitments of the Agreement, is to avoid the use of university rankings in the assessment of individual researchers. The Coalition on Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) now has over 400 signatories, all of whom will be seeking new ways to enact this and other commitments.

In October 2022, the International Network of Research Management Societies (INORMS) Research Evaluation Group developed a new initiative called More Than Our Rank. The initiative provides Higher Education Institutions with an opportunity to describe in a narrative way how much they have to offer society that is not captured by the global university rankings. A small number of signatories have already adopted the initiative which is supported by a wide range of international responsible research assessment organisations.

In December 2022, the Harnessing the Metric Tide review of indicators, infrastructures & priorities for UK responsible research assessment recommended that institutions rethink their use of university rankings, including considering signing up to More Than Our Rank.

2022 saw a number of universities starting to publicly withdraw from the rankings including three Chinese Institutions, one of which, Nanjing University, was in the Top 100. In November 2022 Yale University publicly withdrew from the US News & World Report Law Rankings due to equity-related concerns with the methodology. Six other research intensive universities quickly followed suit, and in January 2023 a further slew of institutions withdrew from the US News & World Report Medical School Rankings.

In January 2023, the United Nations University Institute for Global Public Health published a white paper on Bias and Colonialism in Global University Rankings and have established an international working group that seeks to make recommendations to mitigate these negative impacts.

A Dutch Expert Group on University Rankings will soon share the findings and recommendations of their work and the EUA Annual Conference on 20 April is dedicating its plenary session to a discussion about the role of rankings in universities’ quest for ‘excellence’.

Description of the format
A panel session is proposed to include contributions from the Coalition on Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA), the INORMS Research Evaluation Group, the CWTS Leiden Ranking and the Dutch Expert Group on University Rankings. After the presentations, the panel will have a discussion on the issue informed by audience questions, followed by an audience vote as to whether we should accept, amend or avoid the university rankings.

• 15 years of Research Assessment Exercises at the University of Antwerp: how evolution in the research landscape leads to change in the assessment practice
• A Large Scale Perspective on Open Access Publishing: Examining Gender and Scientific Disciplines in 38 OECD countries
• A survey of how biology researchers assess credibility when serving on grant and hiring committees
• Academic time allocations among Early Career Researchers in Germany and NorwayAn Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Approach in Entrepreneurial and Innovation Ecosystems
• Broadening the conception of ‘what counts’ example of a narrative CV in a university alliance
• Defining and Assessing Uncertainty in India’s Gross Expenditure on Research and Development (GERD)
• Do they know it’s impact time at all? How researchers outline societal impact in research council applications
• Dynamics of the disciplinary structure of research in post-Soviet countries
• Extended-monitoring system：A new attempt in CAS’s research institute evaluation
• Geodiversity of hunger research: Are local authors equally and fairly represented in the scientific literature?
• Guideline Impact Factor – A new indicator to assess journals cited in medical guidelines
• Introducing RRA-Tracker: An online tool mapping the global research assessment reform landscape
• Organizational Factors Affecting Higher Education Collaboration Networks: Evidence from Europe
• Research Collaboration: Characterizing the global trends during the last five decades
• The use of research in policy documents: exploring methodological potentialities
• Tracing collaboration beyond the confines of academia through co-authorship of publications in the humanities
• Uncovering Barriers for Women in Russian Grant Funding: Exploring Rejected and Supported Grant Applications

Ana Persic (UNESCO), Ismael Rafols and Vincent Traag (Leiden Univ.), Ameet Doshi (Princeton Univ), Diana Hicks (Georgia Tech) and Leslie Chan (Toronto Univ.)

This session aims to reflect on challenges of monitoring Open Science, both in terms of the development of OS practices, policies and their effects, building on ongoing work by the UNESCO and the EC PathOS project. There are increasing policy demands for monitoring OS in the face of many initiatives to promote OS by a variety of organisations, from universities to supranational institutions. However, given the large diversity of activities and policies associated with OS, how can these and their effects be monitored? How can we gather evidence of OS developments associated with engagement and dialogue? How can we capture the outcomes and impacts of OS initiatives, e.g. in terms of pluralising the users of scientific knowledge? How can these monitoring efforts be contextualised to account for highly disparate settings?

Alex Rushforth and Janne Pölönen

The publication of the European Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment (ARRA) in July 2022 is the latest, perhaps most high profile, attempt to date to steer research systems towards reform of how individuals, proposals and organizations are recognized and rewarded.

While calls for reform are internationally-oriented in scope, not all countries, regions and organizations have moved with equal speed or enthusiasm to enact this agenda and there are uncertainties about what such change processes entail. This special session focuses on implementation of reforms within four ‘early adopter’ institutions from the Netherlands and Finland – where a national reform program exists – as well as Denmark and Italy.

Speakers in the session have been involved in implementing reforms locally within their own research performing organizations (RPO). We will hear about the process they have gone through, opportunities and frictions they encountered and lessons learnt about resources and infrastructure needed to support such efforts. Being among the first movers in this space, their insights will provide valuable points for discussion, debate and learning for institutions and members of the STI community to engage with ARRA.

Session
The hybrid session will be chaired by Janne Pölönen (Federation of Finnish Learned Societies) and Alex Rushforth (Leiden University), with a short introduction and Q&A discussion with the audience. Speakers (all confirmed) include Sarah de Rijcke (Leiden University), Laura Niemi (University of Turku), Birger Larsen (University of Aalborg) and Francesca di Donato (National Research Council of Italy).

Denis Newman-Griffis, Anne Jorstad, Raquel Roses, Michael Thelwall, and James Wilsdon

This special session aims to explore key cross-cutting considerations in the use of AI approaches in research funding and evaluation. As this is an emerging area of best practice, rather than taking a didactic approach the panel is oriented towards creating a space of mutual  earning and knowledge exchange among the wide range of stakeholders in AI and research funding represented in the STI audience. The panel membership draws on partners involved in the Research in Research Institute’s GRAIL project on Getting Responsible about AI and Machine Learning in Research Funding and Evaluation, and the panel aims to foster the community-driven learning and exchange that underpins the GRAIL project.

Tjitske Holtrop, Thed van Leeuwen, Sarah de Rijcke, Marta Sienkiewicz, and Ludo Waltman

In the past decade, movements to reform research evaluation have been growing internationally, concerned about misapplications of overly narrow performance criteria, at the expense of other qualities or policy priorities such as open science, team science, diversity and inclusion, societal relevance, mission-oriented and transdisciplinary research or citizen science. These debates have brought to the fore what Science Studies has long understood to be the case: scientific knowledge is a collective achievement of many kinds of actors who engage with one another in academic activities in many different ways and for many different reasons. Yet, our structures and cultures of recognition and reward haven’t followed suit, with quantitative performance criteria (such as bibliometrics and grant income) still guiding evaluation and strategic decision making in hiring, career development, and funding. We will host a conversation that explores the struggles and solutions around recognition and reward in academia at large. What do we understand recognition and reward to mean? What are we and are we not recognizing and/or rewarding, when it comes to academic ambitions, activities, actors, and accomplishments? What concrete shifts in recognition and reward have been and are being proposed in Science Studies and beyond? What kinds of practices, collectives and ideas of science, accountability and value do these make possible? And what kind of methodologies and infrastructures are we building to facilitate making visible, and valuable, what has traditionally been invisible? We will moderate a conversation about empirical examples of, reflections on, and proposals for recognition and reward movements in any academic context.

We would like to invite four actors that represent diverse perspectives on the topic for a round table discussion, followed by an interactive conversation with the audience. We aim to write a summary report for one of the journals in our field.

Laura Rovelli, Moumita Koley, Natalia Gras, Robert McLean, Erika Kraemer-Mbula, and Ismael Rafols

In contexts of wide and growing economic, social and environmental inequality, there are increasing demands on scientific and academic ecosystems to contribute with relevant knowledge to address various “grand challenges” and “critical problems”. In the so-called “Global South”, the impact of Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) policies on the well-being of citizens, and in particular, its most vulnerable groups, is diminished by several problems, among which the distortions in research assessment systems, negatively affecting the inclusiveness of STI when it privileges the quantitative and the hegemonic-universal over contextual elements, is one of the most significative.

Based on a set of global and common principles of research assessment reform, the session invites reflection on their implementation in different situated settings and regions of the “Global South”. There is an interest in exploring innovations and experiments in reform that involve inclusiveness in evaluation, targeting regional institutional and career equity and gender perspectives; and social demands for knowledge, seeking its expression – through the organized participation of interested actors and processes of co-creation of open research agendas. An important challenge in tackling the above-mentioned issues is to address regional and local specificities in the directionality and institutional structure of STI, the different approaches for assessing research quality in complex environments, in interaction with different assessment procedures, and the need for further harmonization and coordination.

In a round table format and in a hybrid space of exchange (face-to-face-virtual), the session invites participants and interested audience to share and explore a set of analytical approaches, participatory methodologies and case studies involving grassroots movements, in order to enhance the co-design and implementation of situated and substantive transformations in the evaluation systems of the Global South in dialogue with international efforts.

Euan Adie, Rodrigo Costas, Hans Jonker, Mike Mugabushaka, Biegzat Murat, Ed Noyons, and Catherine Williams

The past few years have witnessed multiple discussions and developments regarding the measurement and study of the societal impact of Science. In this debate, altmetric approaches have been extensively explored in order to capture different forms of interactions between science and broader audiences.

One of the most interesting altmetric sources are policy documents, and particularly the mentions and use that policy documents make of scholarly objects. These include citations to scientific papers, but also mentions to universities, research organisations or even researchers. As a result, the collection and indexing of policy documents can be seen as a powerful source of scientometric data to study and understand the relationships and interactions established by policy makers with science and scholarly actors.

In recent years, several initiatives have been started to collect and develop databases of policy documents and their citations. One of the first of these initiatives was Altmetric.com, which has been indexing policy documents explicitly citing academic publications. More recently, Overton.io has been developing an extensive database of policy documents, as well as their citations, including citations not only to scientific publications, but also between policy documents.

These initiatives and databases have demonstrated the interest and value of indexing policy documents and their interactions with science. They have the potential of bringing a new understanding of science-society interactions and more specifically the role that science and its actors play in the development of (new policies). However, the development and availability of these initiatives and databases also open critical questions around the issues, challenges and potential future developments that databases may need. addressed. Some of these questions include:

• What is the relation between policy and research that may be researched using policy documents?
• What is a policy document? How can they be defined? Why are they relevant? For whom are they relevant?
• What is the coverage of existing databases? What are their potential gaps and challenges?
• What information can be identified and used to further explore the interaction between science and policy?
• What types of data need to be extracted and analysed? What are the analytical and policy questions that can be addressed?
• What can policy documents tell us about the differences/similarities in how research shapes policy in different geographic regions?
• What future developments should be considered in this area?
• What are the possibilities for open data sources of policy documents?
• How can we monitor the interactions between science and policy?
• How can the policy documents contribute to a better system of reward and recognition?

In addition, with the rise of open bibliometric data platforms, another dimension which should be brought to discussion is the potential of including citation links of policy documents in open bibliometric datasets such as OpenAlex or OpenAire research Graph. Related questions include:

• What is the potential of open data of policy documents (and other non traditionally scholarly documents) and their citation links and which benefits do they offer in comparison to proprietary data
• How can interested parties work together to create and maintain open data infrastructures for policy documents (and other non traditionally scholarly documents)

Aims and contribution of the special session
This special session at the STI2023 conference aims at creating a space for reflection about all these questions, enabling the exchange of views and ideas among different stakeholders interested in policy-science interactions, including policy makers, data providers, researchers, and in general, all interested participants attending the STI conference.
The main expectation of the special session is to come up with recommendations and a roadmap for the future development of more inclusive and transparent studies of policy-science interactions.

James Wilsdon and Alex Rushforth

First half of session = hybrid; second half = onsite only

In the past decade, there have been a series of high profile efforts to tackle problems of overreliance on quantitative performance indicators and incentives, including the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), the Leiden Manifesto, the Metric Tide, and ongoing work by the Global Research Council. Most recently the Coalition on Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) has emerged as a significant initiative, and now has more than 500 organisations committed to sharing ideas and evidence in support of responsible and inclusive assessment systems.

The rapid momentum of CoARA reflects a turn in these debates towards implementing, sharing and scaling solutions, within an expanding agenda of responsible research assessment (RRA), which includes more emphasis on healthy work cultures; research integrity; open scholarship; and principles of equality, diversity and inclusion.

At the same time, there is a need to underpin more normative, values-based agendas for reform of research assessment with robust and open evidence and debate as to what works, and which types of interventions are most effective, or may have unintended consequences. The task of aligning international capacity for meta-research, which has also grown over this period, with the priorities and agendas of RRA is still at a relatively early stage.

As a contribution to this task, this special session at STI 2023 will mark the launch of a new initiative – A Global Observatory of Responsible Research Assessment (AGORRA) – convened by the Research on Research Institute (RoRI).

AGORRA will aim to support and strengthen comparative analysis and progressive reform of national assessment frameworks, with a view to better aligning the needs of funders and other key actors in assessment systems with emerging meta-research capabilities. Through an international network of collaborators, AGORRA will run for an initial period of 5 years (2023-2028). Its specific aims are:

• To build and connect flexible research capacity that can be directed towards strengthening the evidence base for RRA and research assessment reform;
• To monitor ongoing developments in national and international frameworks and policies for research assessment, and support transfer and scaling of good ideas;
• To foster and facilitate a culture of analysis and experimentation among research actors engaged in the design, delivery and evaluation of assessment processes;
• To build evidence, awareness and engagement in the possibilities, pitfalls and choices being made with new methodologies (e.g. machine learning), indicators and ‘next generation metrics’;

To work, this initiative will require dialogue, engagement, and critical feedback from researcher, funder and broader communities. With this learning and improvement ethos in mind, we invite the STI audience to participate in this interactive session to discuss the promises, objectives, and potential pitfalls of this initiative.

The meeting will kick off first with a short overview of AGORRA by James Wilsdon and Alex Rushforth, followed by three flash pitches from AGORRA partners on the anticipated relevance of such an observatory to their respective national contexts: Steven Hill (Research England/UKRI) on the UK and future of the REF, Lin Zhang (Wuhan) on China, and Marta Wróblewska (University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw) on Poland.
The second half of the session will have an interactive format, with the audience invited into breakout groups, where they will explore the opportunities, challenges and priorities for a global observatory. Questions for discussion will include: Which interventions merit sustained attention by AGORRA? What would constitute appropriate evidence that a given intervention works? How can we improve learning and exchange across assessment systems? What might be the unintended consequences of scaling-up interventions across a range of organisational, regional and national funding contexts? These insights will then be fed back into the main group discussion.

The meeting will end by outlining future plans and identifying opportunities for the STI community to engage and contribute to AGORRA.

Susanne Koch, Dorothy Ngila, Ismael Rafols, Leandro Rodriguez Medina, Nelius Boshoff, Rodrigo Costas, Jonathan Dudek, Similo Ngwenya, Olena Strelnyk, Shizuku Sunagawa, Camilla Tetley, and Amani Uisso

According to the Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development, reducing inequality (SDG 10) is an essential prerequisite for a world of justice and non-discrimination, and of equal opportunity permitting the full realization of human potential. Science is expected to play a key part in achieving this vision – although being as well structured by multiple forms of inequality and divides within its own system. Epistemic hierarchies not only put certain disciplines before others, but also marginalize knowledge not conforming to dominant paradigms and/or produced outside scientific centers. Aside from researchers’ position in the global research landscape, socially constructed categories such as gender, ethnicity and race affect the degree of scientific credibility ascribed to them.

The aim of this Special Session is to provide a space for exchange on scholarship that maps and examines diversity and (in-) equity in science at local, regional and global levels. In short input talks, scholars and research groups will share how they investigate these topics in specific projects, focusing specifically on relations between theory, methodology and evidence generated.

The presentations will be followed by an extended discussion between an invited discussant, presenters and the audience on the following questions:

• How do we generate evidence of inequalities that structure global science? How do we go beyond making these visible (e.g. by bibliometric analyses) and understand which implications they have?
• How can we come up with meaningful conceptualisations of diversity and (in-) equity? Which theoretical perspectives are useful for understanding links between the social and epistemic structures we find?
• Which methodological challenges emerge when trying to map diversity and (in-) equity in science? How can bibliometric, mixed- and multi-method study designs be meaningfully employed?
• How can we diminish the risks to reproduce inequalities through the methods we apply? How can open science and open databases help in that?

The contributions of the Special Session relate to the broad themes of equity, diversity and inclusion as well as scholarly communication and societal impact of research.

Stefanie Haustein, Heather Woods, Maddie Hare, Isabelle Dorsch, and Carey Ming-Li Chen

The session’s objective is to bring attention to and empower the bibliometric community to take ownership of metrics education. Improving metrics literacies with the goal of reducing the misuse of bibliometric indicators is in line with current transitions towards healthier academic culture, including the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) initiative. The proposed session can work as an incubator of ideas on how to effectively and efficiently communicate the knowledge of bibliometric experts to the wider audience of users of scholarly metrics. We also hope it can facilitate collaborations between various stakeholders, including bibliometric researchers and analysts, data providers and librarians.

Sabina Leonelli is Professor of Philosophy and History of Science and Director of the Centre for the Study of the Life Sciences (Egenis) at the University of Exeter, UK. Her research concerns the epistemology, history and governance of data-intensive science; modelling and data integration across the biological, environmental and health sciences; and open science and related evaluation systems in the global – and highly unequal – research landscape. She currently leads the ERC project “A Philosophy of Open Science for Diverse Research Environments” (2021-2026, www.opensciencestudies.eu ), and her most recent book on Philosophy of Open Science is now available from Cambridge University Press in Open Access format.

Trust and Truth in Research Assessment

The drive towards more responsible modes of research assessment was partly fuelled by over-confidence in poorly-conceived indicators as a source of truth. This led to a lack of trust from the research community in existing evaluative approaches. However this lack of trust extends beyond unhelpful quantitative methods and towards biased forms of qualitative assessment; towards (and between) those professional and academic actors making the assessments; and towards the role assessment plays in the neoliberalisation of higher education as a whole. The responsible research assessment movement provides an opportunity to rebuild trust in, and to debunk myths around the ‘truth’ of, evaluative approaches. This talk will explore how we might achieve this with a particular focus on the INORMS SCOPE Framework for responsible research evaluation.

Dr Elizabeth (Lizzie) Gadd

Dr Elizabeth (Lizzie) Gadd chairs the INORMS Research Evaluation Group and is Vice Chair of the Coalition on Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA). In 2022, she co-authored ‘Harnessing the Metric Tide: Indicators, Infrastructures & Priorities for UK Research Assessment’. Lizzie is the research quality and culture lead at Loughborough University, UK and champions the ARMA Research Evaluation SIG. She previously founded the LIS-Bibliometrics Forum and The Bibliomagician Blog and was the recipient of the 2020 INORMS Award for Excellence in Research Management and Leadership.

Adrian Barnett, Jennifer Byrne, Jason M. Chin, Alex Holcombe, Wolfgang Kaltenbrunner, Stephen Pinfield, Simine Vazire, Ludo Waltman, and James Wilsdon

RoRI and AIMOS will introduce MetaROR to the STI community. The proposed special session has the following objectives:

• To inform the STI community about MetaROR and the underlying ideas on scholarly publishing and peer review, and to address questions from the community.
• To clarify how MetaROR will collaborate with journals in the field of research on research.
• To invite members of the STI community to contribute to MetaROR, as authors, reviewers, and potentially also editors.

Elizabeth Pollitzer, Rachel Palmen, Kartsen Gareis, Lucio Pisacane, Susanne Burer, Helene Schiffbänker, and Martina Schraudner

The purpose of this session is to initiate a multistakeholder dialogue leading to a consensus on how to best monitor inclusion of (intersectional, e.g., age, geography, language etc) gender perspectives in science knowledge-making to support improvements in quality of outcomes for women, men, and other significant but so far underrepresented in knowledge groups. This discussion is needed to:

1. ensure that quality of research and innovation benefits from policy interventions promoting gender equality, diversity, and inclusion in the science system;
2. monitoring impact of Horizon Europe, which asks for gender equality and gender dimensions-related information; and
3. ensuring that policy makers have the necessary evidence to promote continued structural change.

The ENID board meeting takes place in the Jan-Willem Schaapfoyer during lunch time.

The ENID Assembly takes place in the Jan-Willem Schaapfoyer during lunch time.

Research misconduct investigations in China’s science funding system

Conference paper