Bibliometrics in Academic Recruitment: A Screening Tool Rather than a Game Changer
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Bibliometrics in Academic Recruitment: A Screening Tool Rather than a Game Changer Ingvild Reymert1
© The Author(s) 2020
Abstract This paper investigates the use of metrics to recruit professors for academic positions. We analyzed confidential reports with candidate evaluations in economics, sociology, physics, and informatics at the University of Oslo between 2000 and 2017. These unique data enabled us to explore how metrics were applied in these evaluations in relation to other assessment criteria. Despite being important evaluation criteria, metrics were seldom the most salient criteria in candidate evaluations. Moreover, metrics were applied chiefly as a screening tool to decrease the number of eligible candidates and not as a replacement for peer review. Contrary to the literature suggesting an escalation of metrics, we foremost detected stable assessment practices with only a modestly increased reliance on metrics. In addition, the use of metrics proved strongly dependent on disciplines where the disciplines applied metrics corresponding to their evaluation cultures. These robust evaluation practices provide an empirical example of how core university processes are chiefly characterized by path-dependency mechanisms, and only moderately by isomorphism. Additionally, the disciplinary-dependent spread of metrics offers a theoretical illustration of how travelling standards such as metrics are not only diffused but rather translated to fit the local context, resulting in heterogeneity and contextdependent spread. Keywords Bibliometrics · Research Quality · Academic Profession · Recruitment Processes · Candidate Evaluation · Peer Review Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/ s11024-020-09419-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Ingvild Reymert [email protected] 1
NIFU - Nordic Institute for Studies in Innovation, Research and Education, PB 2815, Tøyen, 0653 Oslo, Norway
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I. Reymert
Introduction Across the world, universities and organizations are converging with a growing set of universal standards (Brunsson and Jacobsson 2000; Drori et al. 2006). Faced with rationalization, universities have adopted the idea of the “world class” university and have developed into organizational actors or goal-oriented entities expected to be accountable to stakeholders (Krücken and Meier 2006). Standards and rankings represent the operationalizations of the world class university and universal quality standards (Ramirez and Meyer 2013) and are also applied to satisfy the increased accountability and auditing demands as rationalization is more easily achieved with fewer objectives (Brunsson and Sahlin-Andersson 2000). In addition, the increased use of standards has resulted in global convergence (Baert and Shipman 2005; Power 1999), for instance, how rankings and instruments of comparison in the higher education and science sector have spurred universities to remodel their organizational stru
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