Project Details
Projekt
Evidently excellent? Evidence practices in the preparation of scientific research and biographies for applications for ERC Starting and Consolidator Grants
Applicant
Professorin Dr. Ruth Müller
Subject Area
Empirical Social Research
Term
from 2020 to 2024
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 282210851
Sub-project 8 focuses on evidence practices in the evaluation of scientific quality for research funding purposes. In the contemporary scientific system, high scientific quality – often framed as excellence – has become both a key goal of scientific and political activities and the center of many controversies. How, for example, can excellence be defined, measured, compared and made evident? In phase 1 of the research, the associated project AP2 studied how reviewers for the European Research Council (ERC) perceive and navigate scientific evaluation processes at the ERC, and which norms and values guide their evidence practices and decision-making processes. AP2 highlighted a significant tension between reviewers’ principles and practices: on the one hand, they promoted a vision of excellence as a deeply heterogenous and context-dependent quality of scientific work when they discussed excellence in the abstract during the interview; on the other hand, they recounted a focus on standardized performance indicators when they described how they actually evaluated proposals and CVs during the ERC assessment process. For phase 2 of the research unit, we will now shift the focus of sub-project TP8 to the evidence practices scientists engage in when they prepare applications for the ERC. We will conduct this analysis against the backdrop of broader dynamics and transformations in contemporary science that lead to processes which de- and restabilize notions of scientific quality – processes for which the creation of the ERC itself is indicative. Reviewers and applicants alike need to face up to the challenge of how to make the quality of research ideas and scientific biographies evident. Sub-project 8 will analyze which practices researchers engage in when they attempt to generate evidence for the excellence of their proposals and CVs for review at the ERC. It will further explore which epistemic, normative and institutional implications these practices might have. The project will answer these questions by means of qualitive social science inquiry. We will conduct interviews with researchers and with the university personnel who aim to support their application processes; analyze application documents; and conduct participatory observations at coaching events for ERC applicants. The subproject will study how researchers generate evidence for the quality of their work and their scholarly biographies and thereby create and rehearse new criteria and standards for what counts as high-quality and thus credible science. Given the central role that scientific knowledge plays in evidence practices in a range of social arenas, we believe that such a reflexive analysis of evidence practices in science, which crucially regulate the distribution of resources and academic esteem, is an important element of this group’s research program
DFG Programme
Research Units
