This paper deals with the methodological problem of how to include material influences in comparative studies of research processes. Both Actor-Network-Theory and ‚Mangle-of-Practice‘ confirm convincingly enough that materiality must be taken into account in empirical investigations of...

Social entities create institutional frameworks, i.e. internal systems of rules which govern (but do not control) the actions of their members. Both scientific communities and scientific organisations are social entities whose institutional frameworks include rules promoting internal...

Die qualitative Inhaltsanalyse beansprucht, zwei einander widersprechende methodologische Prinzipien (Offenheit und theoriegeleitetes Vorgehen) zu synthetisieren und darüber hinaus durch ihr regelgeleitetes Vorgehen die systematische Einbeziehung des gesamten empirischen Materials und eine...

Under conditions of an increasing scarcity of reviewer time, a ‘remote peer review’ of research organisations — conducted without meetings between assessors or with the assessed academics at their institution — might be an easier and cheaper solution. This paper explores the impact of...

The aim of this paper is to initiate a discussion about links between epistemic properties and institutional conditions for research by providing an exploratory analysis of such links featured by projects funded by the European Research Council (ERC). Our analysis identifies epistemic properties...

Although ‘research income’ is one of the most common indicators for assessing research quality, its validity has never been systematically investigated. The conditions under which Australian and German physicists obtain external funding were analysed in a comparative qualitative study. The...

Peer review is a practice of research assessment where a researcher's work is evaluated by colleagues working in the same field on similar topics. Since interdisciplinary research is a new synthesis of expertise, the problem arises that peers in that sense do not exist. The aim of the paper is...

Interviews with scientists about the content and reward of collaborations, and classification of contributions of co-authors and scientists cited in acknowledgements, identified six types of research collaborations with distinct patterns of rewards; showed that about half of the collaborations...

Shrinking university budgets make university researchers more and more dependent on external funds. As a response, they develop specific strategies for selecting external funds and for adapting their research. In a comparative interview-based study of experimental physicists working at...