Quantifying Quality: Research Performance Evaluation in Korean Universities

Research performance evaluation in Korean universities follows strict guidelines that specify scoring systems for publication venue categories and formulas for co-authorship credit allocation. To find out how the standards differ across universities and how they differ from bibliometric research evaluation measures, this study analyzed 25 standards from major Korean universities and rankings produced by applying standards and bibliometric measures such as publication and citation counts, normalized impact score, and h-index to the publication data of 195 tenure-track professors of library and information science departments in 35 Korean universities. The study also introduced a novel impact score normalization method to refine the methodology from prior studies. The results showed the university standards to be mostly similar to one another but quite different from citation-driven measures, which suggests the standards are not quite successful in quantifying the quality of research as originally intended.