Cultures of academic worth: What research evaluation rewards and what it leaves out
As governments redesign how research is assessed, the assumptions built into evaluation systems determine which kinds of research come to count as valuable. This keynote draws together findings from large-scale, cross-national studies of how research is evaluated across countries with different funding and assessment systems. It considers the policies that define worth, the formal evaluations that test it, and how these filter through to researchers. Across contexts, societal benefit now anchors conceptions of value. Although countries adopt different tests of worth through their evaluations, there are similarities in broad categories of value, such as economic or policy relevance, as well as thematic areas, such as health or environment. Yet, these broad groupings tend to hide national differences that are concentrated around what is highlighted and downplayed, and therefore what comes to be understood as worthwhile. The talk explores what current assessments reward, what they leave out, and what we can learn about improving research evaluation going forward.
Kate Williams is Associate Professor in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. Her research sits at the intersection of public policy, sociology, and research evaluation, examining how knowledge gets produced, used, and evaluated, and the cultural consequences of shifts in research governance. She is a Chief Investigator on the ARC Discovery project Evaluating the Impact of Metascience and Its Role in Research Policy, and currently leads two further projects on research evaluation and knowledge production: an ARC Discovery Project comparing notions of value across national research impact policies, and a co-led Volkswagen Foundation project on assessing the wider societal value of research across countries (both 2024–2027). This work builds on earlier ESRC and British Academy/Leverhulme funded research on evaluative cultures and the assessment of value in policy knowledge contexts. Kate has held visiting positions at Columbia, King's College London, and New York University. Before joining Melbourne she held posts at the University of York, the University of Cambridge, and Harvard's Weatherhead Center, and she holds a PhD in Sociology from Cambridge.
A/Prof Kate WilliamsSchool of Social and Political SciencesUniversity of Melbourne