Steering effects of research evaluation on SSH early career researchers

Trabajo presentado en The Third Research Evaluation in the SSH Conference - RESSH 2019, celebrada en valencia del 19 al 20 de septiembre de 2019.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.This research was funded by the COST Action European Network on Research Evaluation of the Social Sciences and Humanities (CA15137). COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) is a pan-European intergovernmental framework. Its mission is to enable break-through scientific and technological developments leading to new concepts and products and thereby contribute to strengthening Europe’s research and innovation capacities.Peer reviewe