E w a D a h l i g - T u r e k1 Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland
ESF, ERIH, JCR: OR, THE EVALUATION
OF HUMANITIES
1. The evaluation of research units
Although the direct aim of the evaluation of research units is to determine their productivity and eff ectiveness, the actual goal for units – obviously apart from the most direct one, i.e. to be assigned a specifi c category and the level of fi nance it entails – is to receive an important signal which determines priorities with regard to forms of scientifi c activity for the years to come. Th us, the meaning of evaluation far exceeds the dimension of direct infl uence on units, “penalizing” or rewarding them – as a matter of fact, it may seriously aff ect the future of disciplines. Th efore, the choice of criteria and measures which are used in the evaluation of re-search units’ activity is of the key importance for their existence, in the literal sense.
It is diffi cult to imagine criteria (especially measures) of evaluation which wold be accepted by all units under appraisal: mainly because of the fact that the adopt-ed principles are fi rst of all approvadopt-ed by those institutions which took top positions in the rankings based on them. Th e results of evaluation are largely dependent on the confi guration of homogeneous groups, within which units are compared. Even 1 Th e author is a member of the Core Group of the Standing Committee for the Humanities of the European Science Foundation in Strasbourg, as well as of the Committee for Evaluation of Re-search Units, within which she participates in the works of two Commissions: for the Social Sci-ences and the Humanities and for Art and Artistic Work (she is the chairperson of this commission).
if we deal with units of the same type and apparently similar profi le (such as, for example, historical faculties of universities), the confi guration of disciplines rep-resented in them may signifi cantly favour or disadvantage them in a given group. One of the reasons for this state of aff airs is the fact that particular disciplines dif-fer in their possibilities of publishing in highest scoring journals. As a result, a his-torical faculty, which employs psychologists, will always be more privileged than a unit which does not have them as part of its staff . What also signifi cantly in-creases a unit’s score is its possibility of entering into business contracts (for exam-ple, the inclusion of archaeology in a faculty defi nitely favoured the unit).
Th e application of the same solutions for all disciplines, or even branches of science, blurs the specifi c nature of their activity and leads to questioning the re-sults of an evaluation procedure. Among all the criteria used, what is of the key importance for assessing research activity is the scientifi c result as measured by the number and quality of publications, as well as – in the case of the hard sci-ences – the scale of practical applications, patents and implementations.
However, since not all branches of science have practical applications, the same principles of hierarchy (thus, also scoring methods) of diff erent forms of publica-tion cannot be applied to all of them. Yet, oversimplifi ed criteria did not respect the publication culture specifi c to particular disciplines.
2. Problems in the evaluation of the humanities
Th is standardization particularly aff ects humanists, who are assessed on the basis of criteria resulting from the experience of the “hard” sciences rather than the humanities. Th e principal problems include:
A. Preference for publications in journals and the reduced importance of mo-nographs;
B. Preference for publications in indexed periodicals; C. Preference for publications in the English language.
Ad. A. Scholars in the humanities have long recognized the fact that it is a mon-ograph that is still the main form of publication in their branch of science. It is usually the eff ect of many years of research and it oft en remains topical for decades. Th is argument is not always approved by the representatives of non-humanistic disciplines, in which it is a lot more important to announce the results of research work in journals as the topicality of a publication is relatively short. Th erefore, the application of the same measure (i.e., the same scoring method), although seem-ingly fair, does not refl ect proper proportions of the importance of diff erent types
of publication for particular branches. What is worse, it forces humanistic units to refocus their publishing policy (fast research, fast publication), which may have serious implications for research methods and for the position of the Polish hu-manities in the world.
Ad. B. In Poland, the Ministry of Science and Higher Education issues a stand-ard list of indexed journals. Part A of this list, encompassing 8,610 periodicals included in Th omson Reuters Journal Citation Reports (JCR), comprises only a few items from the fi eld of the humanities. Th us, humanistic units do not have chances of scoring lots of points unless they also include psychologists or sociolo-gists, who have far more possibilities in this respect. Hence, Polish (European) humanists are helpless: they are set a goal which they cannot attain, having no infl uence on American rankings. Th at is why the analysis of citations, which has become routine activity in the hard sciences, fi nds no application in the humanities whatsoever. Th ere are a few reasons for this state of aff airs. Firstly, it must be stat-ed again that the most important form of publication in the humanities is a mon-ograph, whereas the citation indexes of the ISI Master Journal List refer only to articles in selected periodicals. Th us, they ignore not only other journals, but also monographs, conference materials, reports, patents, etc. Consequently, they show the system of scientifi c communication “through the spectacles of ISI”2. Secondly, the journals which were omitted in quoting were mostly those which have been published in national languages, and this phenomenon concerns the humanities in particular. Moed3 notes that while 81–94% of journals in the fi eld of molecular biology and biochemistry are subject to indexation (depending on the country), the number is only 5–24% in the case of the humanities. Although these fi gures come from a few years ago, we may hardly expect a substantial change in propor-tions. While the lack of indexation in Poland is considered to refl ect the weakness of domestic publishing houses, the same phenomenon in the global aspect is be-lieved to be the obvious result of the specifi c nature of the humanities. Th e Th om-son Reuters website says4: “Publishing standards, including timeliness, are impor-tant in the evaluation of arts and humanities journals. Citations patterns in the arts and humanities, however, do not necessarily follow the same predictable pattern as citations to social sciences and natural sciences articles. In addition, arts and humanities journal articles frequently reference non-journal sources (e.g., books,
2 H.F. Moed, Citation Analysis in Research Evaluation, Dordrecht 2005, p. 119–120. 3 Ibidem, p. 26.
4 Bookmark Journal Selection Process – Arts and Humanities: http://thomsonreuters.com/prod-ucts_services/science/free/essays/journal_selection_process/.
musical compositions, works of art, and literature). English-language text is not a requirement in some areas of arts and humanities scholarship where the na-tional focus of the study precludes the need for it. For example, research in re-gional literatures”. Th irdly, the lifespan of humanistic publications is usually very long. Th us, the analysis of citations in a given period, even if it covered all forms of publication, would not give an insight into the value of a publication as this is built and established throughout decades.
Ad. C. We are living in the age of a new lingua franca – the English language has totally dominated information exchange, not only in science. Th erefore, scholars in the humanities do not fi t this unifi ed model: they have to publish in their mother tongues – such is the mission of this branch of science. Th e humanities play a culture-making role, build historical awareness and national identity, preserve national lan-guages and guard values which are evidently threatened today. Limiting this mission through publishing in a language which is incomprehensible for the majority of the society stands in contradiction with the Act of 7 October 1999 on the Polish lan-guage, which stipulates that Polish presents a value of the national culture and it recognizes the need to protect the national identity in the process of globalisation. Having acknowledged that the humanities play a key role in the preservation of national culture, they must be allowed the right to communicate with the society in a mother tongue (incidentally, can any of us imagine German, French or Italian humanists being under pressure to publish mostly in the English language?).
Humanist circles by no means question the need for communicating with the outside world, but we must emphasize a few issues:
• It is not rare that foreign humanists who interested in Polish culture and arts learn the Polish language to be able to read Polish literature; thus, there is no need for provincial complexes.
• Similarly, there is no reason for preferring the English language: communi-cation should be fi rst of all eff ective, enabling access to research results for those circles who are most interested in them. In the case of the humanities they may be published in any language that is specifi c to the cultural envi-ronment under study.
• Th e best solution would be to publish simultaneously in Polish and a foreign language, but economic considerations are an obstacle here: scientifi c insti-tutions and publishing houses do not receive separate funds for translation; they publish periodicals at the expense of their statutory activity, or they might only include summaries in a foreign language. It is oft en impossible to fi nance translation of the whole articles, especially for humanistic insti-tutions which publish a few journals.
Henk F. Moed5 notes that the international exposition of research institutions consists in addressing only selected publications to the global community rather than all of them. Th e research on the ISI CI shows that these indexes have limited reliability when used for measuring the visibility of the humanities and the social sciences. If journals published in national languages are subject to indexation, it does not mean that publication in their pages will automatically be disseminated at a worldwide scale. And vice versa – as the representation of humanistic branch-es in the ISI Citation Indexbranch-es is quite low, publication in a journal from outside the list does not mean that the article has not reached wide audience.
Scholars probably agree that it will be most useful to evaluate the quality of scientifi c research and their published results instead of parameterizing them. Th e qualitative appraisal, however, would be considered to be fair only if the complete homogeneous groups were assessed by the same groups of evaluators, on the con-dition that the element of subjectivity was completely eliminated, which would be quite diffi cult to imagine.
Awarding points to publications included in journals is undoubtedly an ele-ment of the qualitative evaluation: it assumes that all articles in reviewed periodi-cals have to meet requirements regarding their scientifi c level. Th erefore, depend-ing on the reputation of a given journal, a specifi c point value may be assigned to works published in them. However, there is no objective and indisputable method of establishing journal rankings . Th us, relations between the “values” of particular groups of titles will always be a subjective decision (although a joint one) of the teams that prepare them.
3.
Evaluation – the experience of the Bulgarian Academy
of Sciences
Publications are one of the most important, but not the only criterion for the evaluation of research units. When looking for the best assessment method, solu-tions applied in other countries are discussed. Th e evaluation of the units of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (BAS), conducted in 2009 at the initiative of BAS itself, may serve as an interesting example. It was carried out by two important European organizations which deal with promoting, coordinating and fi nancing
research: the European Science Foundation6 (ESF) and All European Academies7 (ALLEA).
It was the fi rst comprehensive evaluation of this type which concerned the units of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, including 69 institutes, centres, laboratories and others, representing all scientifi c disciplines.
Th e position of BAS, which employs 20% of all Bulgarian scientists, but has as big as 50–55% share in the total number if Bulgarian publications acknowledged in ISI Web of Science in the period under study and runs 8 out of 11 centres of excellence, is unquestionable in Bulgaria. It was mainly the quality and competi-tiveness of research in comparison to international standards that were the subject of evaluation – let us notice that the same expectation is formulated in the Act on the Principles of Science Financing with respect to the activity of KEJN ( Komitet
Ewaluacji Jednostek Naukowych – the Committee for Evaluation of Research
Units).
Th is evaluation, conducted by international experts and being mostly qualita-tive rather than quantitaqualita-tive, would certainly be a model to follow were it not that procedures were diffi cult and labour-intensive. Th e evaluation covered the period of fi ve years and took almost one year8. It was conducted by 40 experts working in four panels:
1: Mathematical sciences, Physical sciences, Chemical sciences, Engineering sciences;
2: Biological sciences; 3: Earth sciences;
4: Th e humanities and social sciences.
6 ESF was established in 1974 as a platform for cooperation of 42 initially, and currently 78 member organizations. Th ey include both the institutions which fi nance research and those which conduct it, including academies of sciences, scientifi c societies, research committees and others from 30 member states. Th e ESF’s mission is to encourage cooperation with regard to conducting and funding research, as well as broadly defi ned scientifi c policy. Th e instruments which the ESF uses to support scientifi c cooperation in Europe include: Exploratory Workshops, EUROCORES (European Collaborative Research Scheme), Research Networking Programmes (RNPs) and ESF Research Conferences.
7 ALLEA was established in 1994 by national academies of sciences from 40 countries. Th e goal of this organization is to encourage exchange of information among academies, serve the European society with expertise and promote high quality and ethical standards in science.
8 Th e evaluation contract was concluded in October 2008; in February-March 2009 units deliv-ered self-assessment reports; by June panels of experts conducted a preliminary evaluation and re-quested the institutes to deliver supplements; in July inspections in units and talks with their management and research staff were held; the evaluation process was completed at the end of 2009. Th us, the whole procedure was time-consuming and labour-intensive (it was fi nanced by BAS).
Th e evaluation was based on the Standard Evaluation Protocol9 developed in the Netherlands and used for the assessment of scientifi c institutions. It describes institutions by indicating their strengths and weaknesses, taking the following criteria into account:
• Quality; • Productivity; • Relevance;
• Signifi cance and feasibility of research.
Th ese criteria were slightly adapted to the needs of the evaluation of BAS, com-bining the appraisal of quality and productivity and taking into consideration fi rst of all the scientifi c achievements, international position, innovation potential and research results of an institute.
Quality is defi ned as a measure of excellence of scientifi c activity and a unit’s ability to conduct research at the highest level and to produce eff ects that will be important for the international scientifi c community. Quality also refers to the number of top-class researchers of a given discipline employed in the institute under appraisal. High quality was refl ected in research infrastructure made avail-able to scientifi c circles. Experts determined the quality of a unit on the basis of their own knowledge, talks with its management and staff as well as all kinds of information.
Productivity means the total product of a given institution, including diff erent forms of publicizing individual research. In this case quantitative indexes were applied, including fi rst of all the bibliometric ones, referring to publications and citations, as well as the technometric, concerning patents and citations of patents, and sociometric ones, related to socio-economic research and its application, Th e results achieved by a unit were referred to its human resources. Th e evaluators emphasized, however, that the quantitative approach, which is reliable in the life sciences, remains problematic with regard to the social sciences and the humani-ties. Th e latter branches have diff erent publication traditions and publishing mod-els/patterns may largely diff er among disciplines. Th e limitations of ISI Citation Indexes were emphasized: their bases did not encompass the full range of journals, new scopes of disciplines are underrepresented, impact factor results diff er among 9 See: http://www.allea.org/Content/ALLEA/Th emes/Evaluation/Standard_Evaluation_Proto-col_03–09.pdf. Th e following key Dutch scientifi c associations participated in the development of SEP: Th e Netherlands Organisation for Scientifi c Research (NWO – De Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk), Th e Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW – Konin-klijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen) and the Association of Universities in the Neth-erlands (VSNU – Vereniging van Universiteiten).
disciplines or even sub-disciplines. Members of the panel of the social sciences and the humanities said straightforwardly that the present bibliometric tools are inad-equate for the assessment of either institutions or individual researchers of most disciplines within these branches.
Scientifi c, technological and socio-economic relevance is another evaluation criterion. Th is aspect of assessment concerned the relation between conducted research and current global trends or important developments and issues relevant for wide social groups. Both qualitative and quantitative methods were applied in the evaluation.
Prospects for future, including the signifi cance and feasibility of undertaken research, represented the last aspect under analysis. Th e aim here was to identify the fl exibility of units, expressed in, for example, their ability to close non-prospec-tive studies and to undertake new scientifi c challenges. It was examined whether an institute’s mission was properly defi ned and formulated in relation to the cur-rent development level in given disciplines of science. Th e institute’s research plans were also analyzed and it was checked whether its “portfolio” was coherent in this respect. Other issues that were examined and assessed included: project manage-ment, including cost eff ectiveness of projects, decision-making policy, a unit’s re-sources (including human), its organization and infrastructure. Th e evaluators tried to answer the question whether and how any of those elements might be improved.
Th e evaluation was conducted at three levels: international scientifi c position, domestic socio-economic and cultural usefulness, and internal plans and prospects of a specifi c institution.
As a result of their observation, experts indicated that some units do not con-duct exclusively (or even mostly) basic research, but they play other important functions for the society. Th us, in order not to compare something incomparable, three separate scales of grades were proposed:
Quality and Productivity:
• “A*” for the institution with the leading role in world science;
Th e institute’s contribution to international research has been signifi cant and it is among global leaders;
• “A” for achievements that are competitive at a global scale;
Th e institute’s contribution to a given fi eld of study has been serious and it is believed to be an important “player” at the international arena;
• “B” for the achievements that are visible at the international arena;
• “C” for the work that is reliable and worth continuing, although its eff ects are only visible in a given country;
• “D” for the work which is not reliable or which only copies the results alre-ady achieved before.
Socio-economic relevance: • A – high; • B – medium; • C – non-existent. Prospects: • A – big; • B – moderate; • C – small.
Th e evaluation of units in the fi eld of the social sciences and the humanities was conducted by the same panel of experts. Its members pointed out that institutes fi rst of all mentioned books (scientifi c monographs, collection of essays, critical editions, conference materials, special issues of journals, etc.) among their top-ten achievements, which undermined, in the evaluators’ opinion, the sense of applying bibliometric tools – limited to journals aft er all.
Th e average number of publications per one employee was not calculated, but it was discovered that there was a relation between the international “exposition” of a publication and international activity, expressed in the participation in confer-ences and trips abroad – although this last element appeared in the questionnaire fi lled in by Polish scientifi c institutions, it was not subject to parameterization.
Experts spoke favourably of institutes’ promotional activity, which, for com-parison, was never taken into consideration in the case of Polish parameterization, although it could be treated – at least with respect to humanistic units – as the equivalent of “implementations”.
In the face of clear preferences for publications in the English language in Po-land, it should be noted how international experts assessing the Bulgarian hu-manities approached the problem of publication languages:
“Th e fact that Bulgarian scholars based at the Academy may have worked and lived in all the cultural spheres of the continent and bring those diff erent approach-es back to their institutapproach-es is an invaluable and systematically underapproach-estimated asset: many contacts are cultivated with Germanic, Latin and Slavonic research environ-ments, and one does not yet observe an overpowering dominance of Anglophone infl uences. Surely, in a domain such as SSH, where the emphasis is on cultural heritage, such diversity must be recognized as healthy”10.
10 Research at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Panel 4 Report: Social Sciences, Humanities. Volume 5 of 5, p. 11–12.
4. The European Science Index for the Humanities
While there are no indications that the evaluation system used by ESF-ALLEA was known in Poland, the European Science Foundation was highly recognized in the Polish system of evaluation of research units thanks to the European Reference
Index for the Humanities. Th e ERIH, the project managed by the Standing Com-mittee for the Humanities of European Science Foundation is the answer of the European humanists to the ISI lists (Th omson Reuters). It was initiated in 2002 at the initiative of the representatives of ESF Member Organizations, who started a discussion on low visibility of the humanities in Europe, mainly resulting from the inadequacy of the existing bibliometric databases. ERIH was meant to become a tool for the presentation of the full range of highly valuable publications in the fi eld of the European humanities. It was established in order to achieve two goals: fi rstly, to develop a set of bibliographic and bibliometric tools, which would fa-cilitate the access to humanistic research and would help to evaluate its results; and secondly, to help to increase the publishing level of European journals in the fi eld of the humanities.
It is the only index that has been developed and supervised by European schol-ars, which takes into account – unlike American databases dominated by publica-tions written in English – a wide array of periodicals in all European languages. Th e initial division of journals into three groups (A, B, C), which diff er in their scope of infl uence, was misinterpreted by many circles as their hierarchization, or even discrimination (most non-English language journals were included in group C). It is emphasized in ESF documents, however, that the distinction of categories A, B, and C is not based on the assessment of quality of periodicals, but refl ects their reach/potential audience, which indeed results from the language of a pub-lication. Th at is why the groups have been renamed to avoid associations with any kind of judgement: INT1, INT2, NAT, where INT represents two groups of jour-nals of a wider and narrower international reach respectively, while NAT encom-passes national and regional periodicals.
Th e work on the index started from identifying fi ft een disciplines that are key to the European humanities11, for each of which a separate panel composed of international experts was appointed.
11 Anthropology; Archaeology; History of Art, Architecture and Design; Classical Studies; Gen-der Studies; History; History and Philosophy of Science; Linguistics; Literature; Musicology; Orien-tal and African Studies; Pedagogy and Education; Philosophy; Psychology; Religious Studies and Th eology. In future a list for Cultural Studies, Film Studies and Media Studies is going to be drawn up. It should also be mentioned that psychology, pedagogy and education are “guests” among
hu-Journals selected for the ERIH lists have to meet the following standards: • Objective control of the quality of publications (peer review);
• ISSN;
• Regular publishing;
• Full bibliographic information of citations; • Authors’ address.
Journals were proposed by Member Organizations, and then, following the analysis and evaluation conducted by panels of experts, the fi rst lists were estab-lished and subjected to wide consultation (2006). At the turn of 2007/2008, the preliminary lists were published and publishers of journals received access to a special online questionnaire for data updates. Aft er that, fourteen panels resumed work on updating the lists, which was expected to have been completed by 2009. Up to now (May 2011), the results have not been announced yet12.
It is the ESF Member Organizations that are responsible for the ways in which the ERIH lists are applied on domestic ground, whereas the European Science Foundation dissociates itself from the attempts at using the ERIH for the evalua-tion of individual researchers, either for the sake of scientifi c promoevalua-tion or when applying for grants. In the meantime, aft er the preliminary lists were published, Polish scientifi c circles made eff orts to make the ERIH part of the parametric evaluation of humanistic units as an alternative to the American lists. Th is goal was achieved in 2010, when for the fi rst time publications in journals from the ERIH lists were awarded a bit more points than those from the so-called ministe-rial list B.
In the long-term, it is expected that the project will also encompass mono-graphs and other book publications. However, given growing staff and fi nancial problems occurring at the stage concerning journals, these plans must be deemed a matter of distant future.
Is the ERIH a blessing or a curse of the Polish humanities? It is both one and the other. Th ere is no doubt that it fi lls the gap in Th omson-Reuters indexes. For example, this fi rm’s Arts & Humanities Citation Index encompasses only 1,395 world’s leading arts and humanities journals, including only a few European ones.
manistic disciplines as they basically fall within the scope of competence of the Standing Committee for Social Sciences of ESF.
12 Th e analysis of the seven lists that have already been completed (though not published yet) shows quite signifi cant changes in relation to the preliminary lists – there are journals which have not been included before, some titles have disappeared, while other have been assigned a diff erent category.
Th e ERIH lists take as many as 5,20013 titles into consideration, mainly European ones. Th erefore, they give an unimaginably fuller picture of the humanities, also in Poland. Th e developers of other indexes have also noticed and applied it: aft er the preliminary ERIH lists had been established, some of the titles entered there were absorbed by the Web of Science; Elsevier’s Scopus adopted as many as 2,250 of them – it shows how valuable and signifi cant this initiative has proved to be. As Poland is probably the only country which uses the ERIH lists as a tool of the of-fi cial evaluation of research units, it is considered prestigious for a journal to of-fi nd itself on the list. Th e “ERIH” publishers oft en boast about this fact on their web-sites, eff ectively encouraging potential authors to cooperate with them.
In turn, publishers of the journals which were not proposed by the Polish side at the beginning of the project or of those which are relatively new in the market are making strenuous eff orts to have their titles entered on the ERIH lists14. As it is presently not possible for procedural reasons, they sometimes criticize the ap-plication of this index in national parametric evaluations, claiming that it is a sign of discrimination.
It seems, however, that despite its any identifi able shortcomings, the ERIH is a solution which has no alternative yet: although the lists of journals in the fi eld of specifi c disciplines are incomplete and imperfect, they constitute a better point of reference than any other proposals.
5. Summary
To conclude, let us recapitulate the main arguments for the establishment of meth-ods of evaluation for the humanities that will be diff erent than those for other branches of science. As this text has oft en emphasized the contribution of the European Science Foundation to the issues of evaluation of science, it is worth quoting the defi nition included in the Position Paper published by the Standing Committee for the Humanities of ESF in 2007, which reveals the specifi c nature and depth of this group of sciences:
13 It is an approximate number, resulting from fragmentary reports. Th e fi nal number will be known aft er the complete lists have been published.
14 As an ERIH national contact point, I am oft en asked by the publishers of Polish journals in the fi eld of the humanities what kind of eff orts they should make to have their titles entered in the index. Unfortunately, application procedures have been suspended for an indefi nite period. Hence, a lot of important domestic periodicals will have no opportunity to increase the scoring of their publications.
Th e humanities focus on ‘the human element’ in the physical, biological, mental, social and cultural aspects of life. Th ey attempt to provide insights into how knowl-edge arises from the constant interaction between individual and society. When studying culture, the humanities engage not just with its present manifestations, but also with those of the past. […] Th e humanities study the past in order to under-stand how it contributed to shape the present, they investigate the variety of con-ceptual and cognitive systems that we employ to grasp the present and make deci-sions for the future. Th e humanities are concerned with temporal and spatial manifestations of culture, what distinguishes cultures from each other and what they have in common. Th ey are thus in a unique position to provide insight into how humans shape their world, deal with diff erences and adapt to change.
Th e humanities are concerned with basic issues of timeless importance, and as science, they develop to a large degree through individual activity; the main form of publication is a monograph, whereas journal articles are less signifi cant and less frequently quoted – thus, they are rarely subject to indexation. In other branches of science, there is much more focus on organizing research in groups, on coop-eration and exchange of ideas through conferences and publishing in periodicals, as well as on, as expressed by Moed15, “international research front”; researchers refer to current publications more oft en than in the humanities16.
Th e humanities as a branch of science which shapes the identity of societies and the way of thinking of modern man should have the possibility of exerting a sig-nifi cant infl uence on the language of public discourse; it is thus obliged to preserve national languages, and its form of communication with the society is as important as the contents it conveys. In other branches of science, although a language is always important, it does not represent a value in itself, and precise communica-tion of informacommunica-tion takes precedence.
Th e humanities develop around specifi c cultural circles and it is the language traditionally recognized as specifi c to a given discipline that is a language of inter-national communication (for example, for many historians of art it will be Italian
15 H.F. Moed, op.cit., p. 148.
16 When Moed writes about the specifi c nature of the humanities, he quotes the works of Derek de Solla Price, especially Citation Measures of Hard Science, Soft Science, Technology, and Nonscience [in:] Communication among scientists and engineers, C.E. Nelson, D.K. Pollock (eds.), p. 3–22. Price defi ned a special index (so called Price index), which determines the number of quotations in pub-lications for the literature which is from one to fi ve years old. It appeared that this index is far lower for the humanities than for the hard sciences.
or French, whereas for musicologists – German). In other branches of science, it is English that is the basic language of cross-border communication.
Given the above considerations, the following conclusions might be drawn: • Th e humanities should be evaluated diff erently than other groups of
scien-ces;
• Proper relations in the evaluation of diff erent forms of publication in the humanities should be introduced, which will signifi cantly increase scoring of monographs as compared to journal articles;
• Th e issues of journal indexes must be carefully approached, recognizing the inadequacy of American standards to the European humanities; the ERIH is presently the only acceptable (though imperfect) alternative to them; • Given the limited role of journals and the fact that publications remain
to-pical for years, the analysis of citations with regard to this group of sciences does not have and will never have any reasonable application, because it does not take into account any forms of publication other than journals and it concerns too short, as far as the humanities are concerned, periods; • Humanists should be off ered opportunities and incentives to publish in
their mother tongue and diff erent foreign languages simultaneously; they should be supported through awarding more points to Polish language pu-blications on the one hand, and on the other hand – through fi nancing translation; it is essential for a wide presentation of the achievements of the Polish humanities at the international arena, without damage to the imple-mentation of its culture-making mission in society.
Th e present stage of work of the Committee for Evaluation of Research Units gives hope for a happy end.
R E F E R E N C E S :
Moed H.F., Citation Analysis in Research Evaluation, Dordrecht 2005.
Moed H.F., Linmans J., Nederhof A., Zuccala A., Illescas C.L, de Moya Anegón F., Options for a Comprehensive Database of Research Outputs in Social Sciences and Humanities, Research report to the Project Board of the Scoping Study “Towards a Bibliometric Database for the Social Sciences and the Humanities” set up by the Standing Commit-tees for the Social Sciences and the Humanities of the European Science Foundation (ESF), 2009.
“Research at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences”, Vol. 1–5.
