Quality indicators for the Humanities
How to demonstrate quality and relevance of research in the Humanities? In a working group with Frank van Vree (NIOD) as chair, Thed van Leeuwen (CWTS) and Jack Spaapen (KNAW), I workd on a new and innovating system to do just this. We involved 17 Dutch research schools and more than 200 prominent researchers in the Humanities to accomplish the system.
The website Quality and Relevance in the Humanities shows the results. The main innovation is the free form of the self-evaluation. The narrative form allows for the reporting of the widest diversity in outcomes. Scholarly research in the Humanities is not only about papers in journals, but includes also books, catalogs, films, databases, documentaries and more. And the narrative form allows comprehensive reporting on quality and relevance both in scholarly and societal sense.
The QRiH system gives definitions and descriptions of a very wide variety of indicators and provides with a list of prominent communication platforms such as journals and publishers. Any narrative can be written with concrete evidence: not equivocal but open-ended.