European Educational Research Quality Indicators

EERQI will build an advanced framework for relevance assessment of research documents in educational research based on formal mechanisms including citation analysis and linking, semantically-based full text analysis and co-occurrence of information items in open access and non-open access repositories, as well as in online journal articles, books, and other freely available scholarly publications. Educational research is chosen as an example of socially- and politically-embedded research fields within the humanities and social sciences. The resulting prototype framework of quality indicators and methods will provide the base toolset for a European information service for the observation and evaluation of educational research publications. The toolset can be applied to other social sciences and humanities fields. Complementary to traditional measurements of scientific quality (citation analysis, journal impact factor), new methods and indicators of quality assessment will be tested (usage assessments, versions available, other statistical methods, as well as by means of advanced, semantics-based detection of linking, correlations and referral contexts). The project will also address the complex role of the diversity of scientific languages in Europe. Different mother tongues are a barrier to the international flow of communication while also being fundamental to expressing complex scientific ideas which are often embedded in a certain cultural back-ground. Thus the project will also address the challenge of effectively dealing with multilingualism and specific “cultural heritage” of research traditions in the European countries. EERQI results will also raise visibility and competitiveness of European researchers and contribute to new policy bases for funding, hiring, and evaluation decisions in European academic and research institutions.