July Reading: Evaluating the Unevaluable

This month’s reading is a paper on research evaluation by Ivo De Gennaro. The paper discusses three interrelated questions: first, whether or not scientific research can be evaluated as such; second, what it implies that scientific research is subjected to evaluation, even though it can be shown that it is, as such, unevaluable; third, how the suggestiveness that research evaluation actually has to do with science as such is supported by the fact that evaluation procedures involve peers. In some of its main arguments, the paper draws on the analyses presented in the book The Dictatorship of Value that De Gennaro published jointly with Gino Zaccaria.

Left: Paul Klee, Nach Regeln zu pflanzen (Kunstmuseum Bern)

De Gennaro – Evaluating the Unevaluable