Paper long abstract:

While quantitative performance indicators are widely used by organisations and individuals to assess the "quality" of research and researchers, little is know about their impacts on the epistemic processes of academic knowledge production. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork in the life sciences and climate sciences in the Netherlands, Austria and Sweden, we show how researchers think with quantitative performance indicators at almost every step of a research process.

We focus on three key moments in research processes to show how thinking with indicators is becoming a central aspect of research activities themselves: 1. Choosing a research question; 2. Organising research work within a lab/group; 3. Ending a research process. It becomes visible how the worth of research activities becomes increasingly assessed and defined by their potential for translation into quantitative measures of quality. Other criteria of scientific quality, e.g. epistemic originality, long-term scientific progress, and societal relevance and social responsibility become redefined through their relations to quantitative indicators. We understand this trend to be in tension with goals in policy to encourage innovative, societally relevant and responsible research.