February 10, 2010: Food for Thought

At the seventh 'Food for Thought' session the speakers were Robert Tijssen (CWTS) and Wim Dechering (CA-DS).

• Aim
• Programme
• Details

Aim

The aim of these informal meetings is to provide an opportunity to hear about colleagues' research projects, questions, and methods. The dean hopes that this meeting will see the same fruitful interdisciplinary interaction as the previous ones. The presentations and discussions will be in English.

Programme

At this seventh lunch the speakers were:

Robert Tijssen (CWTS)
Can you measure 'Research Excellence'!?

Only very few people can be truly excellent. In academia, the research achievements of prize-winning scientists and scholars are usually considered a yardstick for determining who’s among the top of their field. However, “research excellence” is becoming an inflated and slippery concept in this day and age, when many countries, regions, cities, research organizations and universities have established self-proclaimed “centers or excellence”, and all university departments seek to become “excellent” in one way or another.


In his presentation Robert Tijssen will critically discuss this fuzzy notion of “research excellence” in terms of measurable dimensions, and possibilities for translating numbers into evidence-based metrics. Citation impact measures are singled out as a key example of a measurement tool that many nowadays perceive as an interesting “objective” supplement to “subjective” peer review assessments of research quality, intellectual impact and scholarly prestige.

Wim Dechering (Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology)
Do we need qualitative analysis?

What are the roots of qualitative analysis and what forms are currently popular? What is possible? Wim Dechering will demonstrate a new beta version of the programme QDA Miner, and then go on to discuss the problems in and possible furture of qualitative analysis. Examples are based on research in medical antropology and his course on qualitative analysis and mixed methods.

Details