Sorting out Guidelines for a Good Evaluation of Research Practices.Towards the Assessment of Researcher’s Virtues

Cinzia Daraio () and Alessio Vaccari ()
Additional contact information
Cinzia Daraio: Department of Computer, Control and Management Engineering Antonio Ruberti (DIAG), University of Rome La Sapienza, Rome, Italy
Alessio Vaccari: Department of Computer, Control and Management Engineering Antonio Ruberti (DIAG), University of Rome La Sapienza, Rome, Italy

No 2019-10, DIAG Technical Reports from Department of Computer, Control and Management Engineering, Universita' degli Studi di Roma "La Sapienza"

Abstract: In this paper, we propose the adoption of moral philosophy and in particular normative ethics, to clarify the concept of “good†evaluation of “research practices†. Our perspective is based on the idea that research is a form of social practice according to MacIntyre (1985)’s conceptualization. From MacIntyre’s notion, we elaborate three typologies of researcher: the leader, the good researcher and the honest researcher. Reflecting on what is a “good" research practice and on what is the role of researchers in it provides insight into some aspects of both the self-assessment process and how this promotes individual improvement. Moreover, this kind of reflection helps us to describe the functions (missions) of the research practices. A “good†evaluation should take into account all the building constituents of a “good†research practice and should be able to discriminate between good and bad research practices, while enforcing the functions of good research practices. These reflections may be the starting point for a paradigm shift in the evaluation of research practices which replaces an evaluation centred on products with an evaluation focused on the functions of these practices. In the last sections of the paper, we introduce and discuss an important aspect for the implementation of the proposed framework. This relates to the assessment of the virtues of researchers involved in a good research practice. Some examples of questions and preliminary items to include in a questionnaire for the assessment of Virtues in Research Practices are also provided.

Keywords: research assessment; good evaluation : research practice; virtue ethics; MacIntyre (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-sog
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://users.diag.uniroma1.it/~biblioteca/sites/de ... ocuments/2019-10.pdf First version, 2019 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:aeg:report:2019-10

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in DIAG Technical Reports from Department of Computer, Control and Management Engineering, Universita' degli Studi di Roma "La Sapienza" Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Antonietta Angelica Zucconi ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).