European Network for Research Evaluation in the Social Sciences and Humanities

The COST Actions allows participating researchers to create networks, exchange opinions and organise training schools, short term scientific missions and conferences.

The challenge of the Action is to enable the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) to better demonstrate their true place in academia and society. To do so, the Action proposes to bring together different strands of work consecrated to SSH research evaluation, currently under development in different parts of Europe, in order to gain momentum, to exchange best practices and results, and to avoid unnecessary duplication. Its main aims, deeply interrelated, are:

• to improve evaluation procedures in order to take into account the diversity and the wealth of SSH research;
• to make a robust case for the ways in which the SSH add value to the society;
• to help SSH scholars better appropriate their research agenda and overcome fragmentation.

The Action will improve the understanding of how SSH fields generate knowledge, what kind of scientific and societal interactions characterise different SSH disciplines, and what are the patterns of dissemination in the SSH. It will therefore benefit to European and international scholars in research evaluation and in the sociology of sciences; to research managers and policy makers at all levels; to research data managers and information system designers; and, last but not least, to researchers in the SSH fields themselves.