Assessing research and its impacts: The generalized implementation problem and a doubly-conditional performance evaluation model

This paper addresses the issue of designing relevant models of indicators to assess research and its impacts. The evaluation of research activities is a complex task for many reasons. There are no perfect indicators or metrics which fit for all purposes. In order to understand the appropriateness of the indicators to be used, we need to frame the problem taking into account the systemic nature of the phenomena and to develop models of metrics that are as close as possible to the reality being assessed. We show some examples of the usefulness of such a framework by discussing university rankings, the complexity of the assessment of research through the generalized implementation problem and presenting a doubly conditional performance evaluation model.