Authors: Samuel Moore, Cameron Neylon, Martin Paul Eve, Daniel Paul O’Donnell & Damian Pattinson

Comment:  A discussion of how the word “excellence” means very little in the context of research evaluation, and can actually be quite damaging. Reviews a range of literature on issues in research evaluation with a focus on rankings and quantitative assessments.

Abstract: The rhetoric of “excellence” is pervasive across the academy. It is used to refer to research outputs as well as researchers, theory and education, individuals and organizations, from art history to zoology. But does “excellence” actually mean anything? Does this pervasive narrative of “excellence” do any good? Drawing on a range of sources we interrogate “excellence” as a concept and find that it has no intrinsic meaning in academia. Rather it functions as a linguistic interchange mechanism. To investigate whether this linguistic function is useful we examine how the rhetoric of excellence combines with narratives of scarcity and competition to show that the hyper-competition that arises from the performance of “excellence” is completely at odds with the qualities of good research. We trace the roots of issues in reproducibility, fraud, and homophily to this rhetoric. But we also show that this rhetoric is an internal, and not primarily an external, imposition. We conclude by proposing an alternative rhetoric based on soundness and capacity-building. In the final analysis, it turns out that that “excellence” is not excellent. Used in its current unqualified form it is a pernicious and dangerous rhetoric that undermines the very foundations of good research and scholarship. This article is published as part of a collection on the future of research assessment.

Moore, S., Neylon, C., Paul Eve, M., Paul O’Donnell, D., and Pattinson, D. (2017). “Excellence R Us”: university research and the fetishisation of excellence. Palgrave Communications 3, 16105.

Source: “Excellence R Us”: university research and the fetishisation of excellence | Palgrave Communications