A bimonthly publication of AQU Catalunya

47

March 2010

Article published in the suplement Cultura of diary AVUI on February 4th 2010

Those of us who spend our lives with lecturers and researchers know how difficult it is to assess each other's work, especially when there is more than one person after just one post. Aside from the decision not always being clearly established, it also involves a lot of time. A large number of people involved in this work are needed, in addition to well established criteria to avoid any arbitrariness. In the so-called hard, pure or exact sciences, criteria are often indirect and quantitative: indirect here means that the reviewer does not directly look at the production presented by the person to be assessed, and use is made of indices, the most important of which are the place of publication (local or international journal, etc.), the language in which it is written (English is almost absolute in this respect) and the impact that it has in the circle of experts; and quantitative means basically if a publication is cited on three or twenty occasions, or not at all. The humanities (geography, history of art, philosophy, philology with translation) and the social sciences (education, political sciences, economics and business studies, sociology, psychology, library science, communication), however, have been following a long behind, which has been both increasingly detrimental and a cause of discontent.

As a consequence of this situation, AQU Catalunya (Catalan University Quality Assurance Agency) last week sponsored various workshops on "Research Assessment in the Humanities and Social Sciences", in which around four hundred professionals participated. No mention is made here of those presenting papers or giving talks, as the list would be endless. The talks were, in objective terms, well prepared and clear conclusions were reached. The organisers said that the intention was to "change whatever is necessary" and to defend these fields of knowledge as being strictly essential in the present-day life of humanity.
Based on criteria from the pure sciences, the main problems detected in these fields are as follows. On the one hand, if the other sciences (mathematics, physics, a large part of medicine, etc.) are universal (if, for example, a French woman is talking to a Japanese man about this), ones such as Catalan, Galician and Basque literature are either more or totally conditioned by a specific place; and, on the other hand, this in itself implicates these latter ones with a specific language that does not have the same value as English: it needs to be published instead in Catalan, and where else should a good article on Verdaguer appear if not in the Anuari Verdaguer, a "local" journal? Another disadvantage is that, in the pure sciences, attention is paid mainly to the journal article, with handbooks and monographs being given little or no value at all; on the other hand, in our disciplines, a book has a value and repercussions that are very different: just think in linguistics of the repercussions of Saussure's Cours (1916), Chomsky's Syntactic structures (1957) or, here in Catalonia, the Diccionari by Ginebra i Montserrat on the use of Catalan verbs.

Conclusions: a) Clear assessment criteria are necessary. b) The book is a key element. c) A combined procedure is needed that is both indirect and direct, with the reviewer personally having the publications in his/her hands. d) Assessment should not totally condition the work and freedom of researchers (otherwise we risk becoming enslaved by this). e) In these fields of knowledge, research has both a scientific and social value (commitment to the environment). f) No discrimination on the grounds of language or subject (there are, for example, legal systems that are specific to a community). g) The setting up of a catalogue of reliable journals and publishers is one of the main outstanding issues. AQU Catalunya says it is not down to the Agency to resolve this.