U. S. Research assessment: Recent developments

Abstract

Over the last decade, ex post research assessment at the program level in the United States has seemed much less active than the equivalent activities in Europe, both west and east. This seeming lull was the result of a decline in program evaluation activity across the U.S. government in the 1980s, which slowed the rate of formal evaluations. Program review activities within agencies, however, were common, especially at such mission-oriented research supporting organizations as the Department of Energy and the Office of Naval Research. Review processes at these agencies relied primarily on expert assessment, sometimes at the project level, supplemented by user inputs. Quantitative performance measures were seldom used. That situation is about to change. In 1993, Congress passed the Government Performance and Results Act, which requires all agencies including those support research to set quantitative performance targets and report annually on their progress toward them. Agencies with clear technological goals are rapidly developing sets of indicators for this use, including peer assessments, bibliometric measures including patents, and customer satisfaction ratings. But fundamental research agencies do not find such measures satisfactory, and are just beginning to develop alternative ones.