Encore l’évaluation métrique

Un article signalé sur le blog du Centre Emile Durkeim se penche sur la concurrence possible entre l’évaluation métrique (bibliométrie) et l’évaluation qualitative, dans le cadre du RAE britannique: “Evaluating University Researche Performance using metrics” [Linda Butler et Ian Macallister, European Political Science, vol. 10/1, 2011, pp. 44–5]

• Evaluations of research quality in universities are now widely used in the advanced economies. The UK’s Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), which began in 1986, is the most highly developed of these research evaluations. Based on peer review and involving some sixty-nine panels evaluating the research work of more than 50,000 academic staff, the exercise is expensive and time consuming. In this article, we examine the possibility that a quantitative, metrics-based approach can provide a low-cost alternative to expensive, qualitative peer review. To do this, we build on our previous work on political science by extending a metrics-based model to chemistry, using the results of the 2001 RAE. Our results show that no single model will apply across science and non-science disciplines. Any metrics approach to performance evaluation has to use a discipline-specific suite of indicators.

Leurs conclusions générales n’apportent rien de révolutionnaire: ils mettent en différence des “comportements” bibliométriques étroitement lié aux disciplines et confirment que pour les SHS la bibliométrie est d’un usage peu pertinent.