La Fièvre de l'évaluation de la recherche du mauvais usage de faux indicateurs

Abstract

European Research Evaluation Fever in the Social Sciences: After hitting Germany recently, the European fever of evaluating research in the social sciences has hit France with the classification of research journals by the official AERES. This dossier of the BMS consists of three contirbutions concerning bibliometrics, evaluation and the recent AERES classification. We reprint the "Introduction" of the research report byYves Gingras (UQAM), "Researcg Evaluation Fever- Bad Use of False Indicators". We then publish a report by Laurence Coutrot (CMH-CNRS), "On the Récent Use of Bibliometric Indicators as Evaluation Tools in Scientific Research", concerning the récent CNRS meeting on the question of bibliometrics. This is followed by a report prepared by François Briatta (ANCMSP). The French Agency for the Evaluation of Research and Higher Education (AERES) recently published journal rankings in the human and social sciences. This document compares AERES rankings for francophone journals in sociology/demography and political science with two former rankings, by Philippe Jeannin and by the authors of a CNRSsponsored "Periodicals study" respectively. We first observe that the threefold classification used in each ranking resorts to different criteria, in such a way that no methodological consensus seems to émerge from the comparison. The rankings themselves are starkly heterogeneous: in political science, only 11 joumats appear in the two compared rankings, only eight of them with the same rank. In sociology/demography, 26 "ranking agreements" and 17 divergent rankings are observed within the range of comparable journals.