| Themes | Categories | Example of interview quotes |
|---|---|---|
| Organisational response: features of PMS at the university level | University strategy | Our PMS is designed along the metrics used in PBF. Part of the state grant achieved on an FTE cost per student basis is useful to fund operations related to the number of students, but it is not performance-based. We are a research university, so we can’t allocate FTE faculty hiring according to the number of students in charge of each department. Our teaching activity is driven by research (Rector) |
| Research performance metrics | It is not an easy task to identify reliable metrics for comparing the quality of very different scientific outputs. It is necessary to refine the metrics (male full professor – SoSc) | |
| Internal ranking of departments | We have learned the hard way that VQR’s metrics do matter. My department got a low performance score in the last VQR so that now we can’t hire new staff because of the University’s resource allocation system. I had to raise awareness of the importance of dealing with research performance metrics above all. Now professors have started to be aware, also because their results impact the entire department (female department head – SoSc) | |
| External pressures | Research assessment | I focus more on ranked journals. This seems to me a nonsense. In the past, books were well considered. Now, a research monograph is valued less than an article published in a journal. Writing a good book takes a lot of time. In the past this effort was valued; now it is not (male assistant professor– SoSc) |
| Career rules and performance metrics | The national qualification in my discipline is based on bibliometric indicators, so scholars have been forced to produce a few fashionable and important research projects to ‘slice up’ in several outputs, in which moreover you cite one another (female assistant professor – HSc) | |
| Journal ranking | My publishing choices are influenced by journal ranking. Sometimes I choose well-known open access journals if I need to publish quickly (male assistant professor – HSc) | |
| Competitive funding | We are urged to pay attention to bibliometric indexes for selecting the best journals for our research outputs in order to have a better chance to be rewarded and to get funds (male associate professor – HSc) | |
| Research competition | We must also consider that it is very important to accumulate citations in a short time. The more people participate in the work, the more quotes you can get (female assistant professor – HSc) | |
| Individual academic responses to PMS | Detachment | I think that managing operations as a coordinator of a degree programme, as well as finding solutions to everyday problems is for me more important than QA performance metrics per se (female full professor – SoSc) |
| Business as usual | It is important to identify the right outlet for scientific contributions, but it has always been important, it’s not new (female associate professor – SoSc) | |
| Epistemic re-orientation | In the past I spent a lot of time supervising students, but now I have to convey my efforts on research … I had to study a lot to change my research subject, so I had to reduce teaching activities (female assistant professor – HSc) In my research group, we look for the most cited journals; it’s like a business. In the past, you got a research result and just wanted to publish it, now you start with a publication strategy (male full professor – HSc) […] there has been an impoverishment of research activity useful to our industries, banks in the national context. We are focused only on international mainstream research topics (female full professor – SoSc) We do not publish any more research in Italian. We only publish for international English-language journals. Nothing else (male associate professor – SoSc) The existence of a research evaluation system pushes you to work harder. Since the VQR has been implemented, I have set quantitative targets that have led me to publish more (male full professor – SoSc) |
| Themes | Categories | Example of interview quotes |
|---|---|---|
| Organisational response: features of PMS at the university level | University strategy | Our PMS is designed along the metrics used in PBF. Part of the state grant achieved on an FTE cost per student basis is useful to fund operations related to the number of students, but it is not performance-based. We are a research university, so we can’t allocate FTE faculty hiring according to the number of students in charge of each department. Our teaching activity is driven by research (Rector) |
| Research performance metrics | It is not an easy task to identify reliable metrics for comparing the quality of very different scientific outputs. It is necessary to refine the metrics (male full professor – SoSc) | |
| Internal ranking of departments | We have learned the hard way that VQR’s metrics do matter. My department got a low performance score in the last VQR so that now we can’t hire new staff because of the University’s resource allocation system. I had to raise awareness of the importance of dealing with research performance metrics above all. Now professors have started to be aware, also because their results impact the entire department (female department head – SoSc) | |
| External pressures | Research assessment | I focus more on ranked journals. This seems to me a nonsense. In the past, books were well considered. Now, a research monograph is valued less than an article published in a journal. Writing a good book takes a lot of time. In the past this effort was valued; now it is not (male assistant professor– SoSc) |
| Career rules and performance metrics | The national qualification in my discipline is based on bibliometric indicators, so scholars have been forced to produce a few fashionable and important research projects to ‘slice up’ in several outputs, in which moreover you cite one another (female assistant professor – HSc) | |
| Journal ranking | My publishing choices are influenced by journal ranking. Sometimes I choose well-known open access journals if I need to publish quickly (male assistant professor – HSc) | |
| Competitive funding | We are urged to pay attention to bibliometric indexes for selecting the best journals for our research outputs in order to have a better chance to be rewarded and to get funds (male associate professor – HSc) | |
| Research competition | We must also consider that it is very important to accumulate citations in a short time. The more people participate in the work, the more quotes you can get (female assistant professor – HSc) | |
| Individual academic responses to PMS | Detachment | I think that managing operations as a coordinator of a degree programme, as well as finding solutions to everyday problems is for me more important than QA performance metrics per se (female full professor – SoSc) |
| Business as usual | It is important to identify the right outlet for scientific contributions, but it has always been important, it’s not new (female associate professor – SoSc) | |
| Epistemic re-orientation | In the past I spent a lot of time supervising students, but now I have to convey my efforts on research … I had to study a lot to change my research subject, so I had to reduce teaching activities (female assistant professor – HSc) |