A Vocation Towards a Structural Change in Academic Evaluation: A Study of the Multi-Level Research Assessment in Uruguay

This presentation is a synthesis of a report commissioned to me by Uruguay's National Science and Innovation Council (CONICYT) out of an interest in assessing the state of the evaluation of researchers in the country and supporting a change towards new institutional practices. Uruguay is a relatively small country of near 3 million citizens, with 1.84 researchers per 1000 economically active inhabitants. in 2007 the National Researcher System (SNI) was created and consists in 4 ascending positions with a salary incentive. One public university (the University of the Republic Uruguay) accounts for 75% of the national research output and holds two different institutional evaluations: a) for the tenured positions and b) the Full-researchers regime (RDT). Other 5 academic evaluation systems exist and most of them have different regulations and criteria. As a result, a researcher in Uruguay may be exposed to 5 different evaluations in one same year, and many of them are not integrated into the Uruguayan Curriculum Vitae system, so efforts are excessively demanding and replicated. The previous diagnosis made in several institutions in Uruguay had observed an extensive overlap between the national and institution-level evaluations that exist in the country. Our report was intended to analyze the different evaluation systems and provide recommendations for a reform. The study includes comparisons between the evaluation systems and researcher profiles, styles of knowledge circulation (e.g., publications, books, etc.), combining this approach with interviews and focus groups made with evaluation committees, officials and researchers. Finally, the report contains 20 recommendations for the academic evaluation in a research community that is featured by a permanent vocation for change in a highly autonomous academic field that can become a problem to make it a reality.

The report includes twenty recommendations for each of these systems across a range of topics.