The Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) seeks to reform the standards by which research performance is assessed, by giving more weight to qualitative factors rather than quantitative ones. The global network of universities, research institutions, and research funding organizations was initiated by the European Union in 2022. Mainz University of Applied Sciences has supported this reform movement as a member since 2022.
The institutions that have joined CoARA are committed to evaluating research performance at their own institution in a much more differentiated way. Mainz University of Applied Sciences is working with institutions from the DACH region (DACH = Germany, Austria, Switzerland), the Netherlands, and Scandinavia as part of a working group to develop new, more qualitative assessment standards for research performance. Ideas are generated across institutions in an exchange of best practices with the aim of developing, piloting, and applying new assessment standards in the long term.
To date, research performance has primarily been measured quantitatively, for example on the basis of publication figures, third-party funding, or citation frequency. In practice, the competition for the highest indicators leads to distortions in the research system at the expense of quality. Traditional indicators such as the impact factor are tailored to specific disciplines and often do not do justice to interdisciplinary research, for example. This imbalance gave rise to the desire for qualitative approaches that reflect the broad diversity of the research practice in the various disciplines and thus establish a fairer basis for evaluation.
Over 700 institutions around the world have now joined CoARA. The member organizations themselves can define the implementation of the agreement considering their individual framework conditions and objectives and in collaboration with their researchers. The spectrum of possible criteria for future research evaluation is broad: qualitative and quantitative indicators, peer review procedures, or interdisciplinarity.
