Project coordinator: Prof. Dr. Ingrid Gogolin, University of Hamburg

 

Upon instigation of the European Educational Research Association  (EERA) and its members, the University of Hamburg under supervision of Professor Ingrid Gogolin has submitted a project entitled European Educational Research Quality Indicators (EERQI) in the 7^th Framework Programme of European Union. EERQI has now been funded as a small collaborative project with 1.494.564  Euro and will officially begin on 1^st April 2008 for a three year period.

 

 

EERQI will build an advanced prototype framework for relevance assessment of research publications in educational research. This will be based on formal mechanisms including citation analysis and linking, semantically-based full text analysis and co-occurrence of information items in open access and non-open access repositories. Journal articles, books and other freely-available scholarly publications are included.

 

Educational research has been chosen as an example of research in socially- and politically embedded fields within the humanities and social sciences.

 

The resulting prototype framework of quality indicators and methods will provide the base toolset for a European information service for evaluation of educational research publications and can be applied to other social sciences and humanities fields. Complementary to traditional measurements of scientific quality (citation analysis, journal impact factor), new methods and indicators of quality assessment will be tested (usage assessments, versions available, other statistical methods, as well as by means of advanced, semantics-based detection of linking, correlations and referral contexts).

 

The project will also address the complex role of the diversity of scientific languages in Europe. Different mother tongues can be a barrier to the international flow of communication, but they are at the same time fundamental to expressing complex scientific ideas which are often embedded in a certain research tradition and cultural back-ground. Thus the project will also address the challenge of effectively dealing with multilingualism and specific 'cultural heritage' of research traditions in the European countries.

 

EERQI results will also raise visibility and competitiveness of European researchers and contribute to new policy bases for funding, hiring, and evaluation decisions in European academic and research institutions.

 

The Project will be carried out by a Consortium of 19 Institutions, including two international and two  national learned societies in educational research, as well as departments of education at European universities, computer and documentation centers, and publishers of educational research. The Project website is http://www.eerqi.eu . All public documents from the project will be available in open access on this site in the very near future.