Mastodawn

Maryna Nazarovets May 22, 2025

Sunny & welcoming Helsinki was the perfect setting for #RESSH2025 — on research assessment & policy in SSH.

I spoke on indexing gaps for university journals & their impact on visibility & evaluation. 👉 https://zenodo.org/records/15486982

Grateful for the honest conversations, future research plans, and a truly engaged academic space.

I fell in love with Finnish cuisine and the Oodi, which was not a conference venue but impossible to miss.

University journals in global indexing databases: Preliminary results on visibility and coverage disparities

University journals provide an essential service in the scholarly publishing landscape by offering institutionally supported platforms for disseminating knowledge, often in open access formats. However, they are significantly underrepresented in global indexing databases, which affects their visibility, discoverability, and role in research assessment systems. This presentation presents findings from a pilot study aimed at exploring how UJs are indexed across bibliographic infrastructures. A sample of 68 UJs from ten countries was analyzed using data from Ulrichsweb, OpenAlex, DOAJ, Web of Science CC, and Scopus. The results highlight considerable disparities in coverage, inconsistencies in metadata, and challenges in identifying UJs across systems. The study contributes to broader discussions on bibliodiversity, metadata quality, and the need for more inclusive indexing practices in global scholarly communication. Presented at RESSH2025, May 19-21, Helsinki, Finland

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Meta Cramer May 18, 2025

On my way to Helsinki to co-present a conceptual argument on research evaluation systems from a global perspective at #RESSH2025 with @MartinReinhart: we think about who steers science through evaluation, the role of transnationality and governmentality. Looking forward to the discussion, preprint available here: https://zenodo.org/records/14961710

This is the first argument we developed in the recently started collaborative project on global publishing cultures https://www.rmz.hu-berlin.de/en/research/publishing/publishing?set_language=en

Understanding the Governance of Science from a global Perspective: A heuristic of Research Evaluation Regimes

The article presents a heuristic distinguishing research evaluation regimes along four axes of characteristics – the constellation of actors (1), procedures (2), functions (3), and programmes and values (4) – to better understand the governance of science through evaluation from a transnational perspective. We start by showing that existing literature can be characterised by a methodological nationalism, excluding regional or transnational constellations, secondly, focuses on operative and technical aspects of research evaluation systems, such as procedures, tools and indicators of metrics-based measurement, as well as its role for funding allocation, and lastly, does not systematically acknowledge the diverse constellations of evaluating and evaluated actors and non-centralised research evaluation regimes. Based on this, we argue to account for the diversity of evaluating and evaluated actors and their logics as well as normative and performative aspects of research evaluation regimes. Building on insights in the sociology of valuation, we critically reframe accounts of centralised research evaluation systems with one core evaluating body by describing the constellation of evaluating and funding actors as heterarchical. In addition, by drawing on Power’s seminal work on the ‘audit society’, we account for normative aspects of evaluation regimes in considering the role of political programmes and evaluative cultures as discussed in research on the relationship of science and society. The heuristic is presented as a starting point to conduct context-sensitive, comparative studies of research evaluation regimes from a transnational perspective to promote a more nuanced understanding of the power constellations of evaluation regimes and related ways of governing science.

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