Academic Careers Understood through Measurement and Norms

ACUMEN addresses the current discrepancy between the broader social and economic functions of scientific and scholarly research in all fields of the sciences, social sciences and the humanities and the dominant criteria for evaluating performance by researchers. The assessment of the performance of individual researchers is the cornerstone of the scientific and scholarly workforce. Evaluation of individual scholars happens at different careers stages and comes in different forms, among others: job interviews, annual performance assessments, journal peer review of researchers’ manuscripts, and reviews of grant applications. These evaluations have a tremendous influence on all aspects of knowledge production. Moreover, the very criteria of what counts as excellent and relevant research for the next generation of researchers will be strongly influenced by their current experiences in the regular evaluation exercises to which they are subjected. It is therefore urgent that the criteria used in evaluations at the individual level have a clear and well-understood relationship with the requirements that scientists and scholars will need to meet in the near future. ACUMEN is a European research collaboration aimed at understanding the ways in which researchers are evaluated by their peers and institutions, and at assessing how the science system can be improved and enhanced.