Infos and News
New paper published (March 2025)
Field size as a predictor of “excellence.” The selection of subject fields in Germany’s Excellence Initiative
We investigate the selection of subject fields in Germany’s “excellence initiative,” a two-phase funding scheme administered by the German Research Foundation (DFG) from 2005 to 2017 to increase international competitiveness of scientific research at German universities. While most empirical studies have examined the “excellence initiative’s” effects at the university level (“elite universities”), we focus on subject fields within universities. Based on both descriptive and logistic regression analyses, we find that the “excellence initiative” reveals a stable social order of public universities based on organizational size, that field selection is biased toward those fields with many professors and considerable grant funding, and that funding success in the second phase largely follows decisions from the first phase. We discuss these results and suggest avenues for future research.
New paper published (January 2025)
Have public universities in Germany become more isomorphic? Methodology and empirical test, 1995-2020
Despite being a well-known concept in neo-institutional organization theory, isomorphism (or structural similarity) has been conceptualized and empirically examined by very few studies. This paper examines isomorphism quantitatively in German higher education, using the Relative Specialization Index. Drawing on a comprehensive data set that includes information on professorial staff and students, as well as basic and grant funding, our paper shows, first, that most variables show an isomorphic pattern, and second, that German universities have become more isomorphic over time. We discuss possible explanations of this result and avenues for future research.
New research project (October 2024)
How has the repertoire of German symphony orchestras changed since 1949, and what factors have influenced this development?
These questions will be addressed by the new project by Prof. Dr. Heinze and Prof. Dr. Mark Lutter in cooperation with Prof. Dr. Barbara Wiermann (Sächsische Staats- und Landesbibliothek Dresden). The project is funded by the DFG with 840,000 euros over three years.
Further information can be found in the Press release.
New Book published (July 2024)
Prof. Heinze published an Open Access book on "Organisationsformen der Erkenntnisgewinnung. Organisatorische Gestaltung und Wissensproduktion in der außeruniversitären Forschung (together with Rupert Pichler). The book is available here: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/978-3-658-44331-3.pdf
The open-access book examines how the organizational design of research institutions influences their content and methodological orientation, as well as how disciplines and research fields have evolved and adapted to new institutional contexts over time. The presented historical case studies are related to each other using a common analytical framework, allowing for general insights beyond the individual cases. One such insight is that new research fields are often established more successfully in research institutions outside of universities. Additionally, research fields can be successfully established when institutes and centers are granted organizational and financial independence. The volume provides insights into innovative organizational forms and the transformation of existing research institutions in the natural, social, and technical sciences.
Press Release can be found here.
New preprint published (March 2024)
We investigate the selection of subject fields in Germany's "excellence initiative," a two-phase funding scheme administered by the German Research Foundation (DFG) from 2005 to 2017 to increase international competitiveness of scientific research at German universities. While most empirical studies have examined the "excellence initiative's" effects at the university level ("elite universities"), we focus on subject fields within universities. Based on both descriptive and logistic regression analyses, we find that the "excellence initiative" reveals a stable social order of public universities based on organizational size, that field selection is biased toward those fields with many professors and considerable grant funding, and that funding success in the second phase largely follows decisions from the first phase. We discuss these results and suggest avenues for future research.
Isabel M. Habicht awarded prestigious fellowship to spend one year at Harvard University (February 2024)
Isabel M. Habicht has been awarded the John F. Kennedy Memorial Fellowship and will be spending the academic year 2024/2025 at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies (CES) at Harvard University. As a visiting scholar at the CES, she will work on her habilitation regarding the question "How do policy regimes foster (wo)men’s work-family preferences as reflected in parental leave decisions?".
New Version of Research and Teaching Profiles Database released (January 2024)
A new version of the Research and Teaching Profiles Database has been released. Please check here.
There is also a press announcement (in German), detailing some aspects of the new release. Please check here.
New preprint published (November 2023)
This paper aims at understanding continuity and change at public universities in Germany with a focus on the growth (and decline) of subject fields. We apply three theoretical perspectives to investigate how disciplinary profiles, size, age and prestige are associated with structural change of the university landscape. Despite the relative stability with respect to the four main disciplinary groups (humanities, natural sciences, engineering and social sciences), non-technical universities (NTUs) have experienced more structural change than technical universities (TUs). At the same time the natural sciences are shrinking while the social sciences are growing. We find that larger and older universities host disciplines affected by decline while smaller and younger universities embrace growing disciplines. In addition, while NTUs supported by the German Excellence Initiative exhibit a stronger disciplinary profile in the natural sciences, universities without such support (both NTUs and TUs) are more social sciences-oriented.
New preprint published (November 2023)
This paper presents a classification of teaching and research fields at universities that allows an unbiased calculation of disciplinary profiles using heat maps. This new classification and the disciplinary profiles derived from it are based on the Activity Index (AI), which can be converted by an appropriate transformation into an index with symmetric value range (RESP). Using public universities in Germany as an example, we show why both AI and RESP values are biased when data sets with many missing or zero values are used, how such a bias manifests itself, and how the new classification enables a bias-free calculation of disciplinary profiles.
New paper published (November 2023)
This paper examines practices of generating reliable evidence for decision-making using the example of bibliometric research assessment. We analyze how bibliometric methods have been implemented in the national evaluations of higher education institutions in the Netherlands and Italy. The selection of these two countries is based on a comprehensive meta-evaluation of bibliometric assessment practices in Europe in the period 2005 –2019. We argue that these two countries represent opposite poles with regard to possible approaches for the construction of reliable expert knowledge. The case of the Netherlands (Strategy Evaluation Protocol) can be characterized as a model of bibliometric professionalism that has had an enhancing efect on university autonomy and has over time led to broad acceptance of bibliometric indicators among academic disciplines. In contrast, the case of Italy (Valutazione della Qualità della Ricerca) represents a centralistic bureaucratic model that, while coopting elites from academic disciplines, has met with harsh methodological criticism from bibliometric experts. We apply Andrew Abbott’s sociology of professions to the feld of evaluative bibliometrics in order to analyze the diferences between the two country cases.
New paper published (April 2023)
This paper discusses the SEU approach with regard to its “jurisdiction”; i.e. where it should and where it should not be applied. It is argued that the SEU approach must address the fundamental tension between exploration and exploitation; that it should be applied only to disciplines or fields that have low degrees of both technical and strategic uncertainties; and that funders need to prevent the SEU approach from spilling over to evaluations of exploratory projects, for which it is clearly not suited. In addition, the paper argues that the SEU approach needs to respond to the “fund people, not projects” argument. Finally, it calls for many more empirical and preferably experimental studies with the aim of shedding light on how the SEU approach works in practice. In this regard, novel techniques should be used more frequently than today, such as specification curve analysis that encompasses all reasonable explanatory specifications that are both theoretically consistent and statistically valid and non-redundant.
Heinze, T. (2023): The jurisdiction of the subjective expected utility (SEU) approach to risk-taking in science – A response to Franzoni and Stephan (2023), ‘uncertainty and risk-taking in science’. Research Policy 52(3). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2022.104708
New Handbook Chapter (August 2022): Research funding in the context of high institutional stratification. Policy scenarios for Europe based on insights from the United States.
This paper argues that stratified structures in university systems should be addressed more explicitly in debates on research funding. The paper connects findings from several streams of literature on US-American research universities: (a) the relationship of organizational status and scientific quality, (b) positional competitions among elite universities, (c) concentration of research funding, and (d) faculty exchange networks as measures of university prestige. Taken together, these literatures reveal a crystalline hierarchy with intense competition for scientific talent at the top but little opportunity for upward institutional and personal mobility. While elite universities provide advantages in terms of research output and prestige, the findings point to social closure as a potentially problematic outcome for a democratic knowledge society. Therefore, the comparison highlights two policy challenges by means of two scenarios: closing the gap in organizational resources, while at the same time ensuring continuing expansion of the research university system in Europe.
New Paper (July 2022): Innovation Crisis in Public Theater? A Longitudinal Study of Theaters in North Rhine-Westphalia
This paper examines cultural innovations in German public theaters using North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) as the most populated region as an example. Though existing analyses, including social structure-centered audience research, have focused on the demand side, diagnosing a steady decline and aging of the cultural audience, our analysis addresses the supply side, especially the number of premieres and first performances and their adoption into the repertoire. The results show that recent efforts by public theaters to increase both the number of venues and the number of plays on the municipal or regional level have not been sufficient to stabilize the declining audience. Too few new plays are scheduled, even fewer of which make it into the repertoire. Our results suggest that theaters can retain their capability for renewal only by placing significantly more new plays and attracting new audience members. With regard to such renewal, decentralized competition as a characteristic of the NRW theater landscape seems a favorable institutional context.
New Paper (April 2022): Two-dimensional mapping of university profiles in research
There are size-leveling indexes used to demonstrate profiling of entities in different fields, such as the Activity Index (AI) or the Index of Relative Specialization (RESP). Concentrating on the RESP, we consider German state universities as entities and their academic disciplines as fields. While it is common to illustrate several RESP values concurrently using heatmaps, we show that an interpretation of such heatmaps without further information can be misleading. Therefore, we introduce a weight for each RESP value that represents the fraction of a field at a university. Those weights correspond to RESP values that are uniquely identifiable by field and university, resulting in tuples of RESP values and their weights. We introduce a new kind of heatmap that not only illustrates RESP values but represents their corresponding weights. Those new heatmaps are less misleading than classical ones. Our introduction of a new class of heatmaps improves heatmap representation, especially for longitudinal RESP data without the need for additional tables to show the extra information.
New DFG Project (March 2022): Political upheavals and their influence on the development of mathematics.
How did mathematics develop in Germany between the years 1920 and 1960 under the impression of political upheavals? Professors Dr. Volker Remmert and Dr. Thomas Heinze at the University of Wuppertal are investigating this central question in a new joint project. They are receiving a total of 650,000 euros in funding from the German Research Foundation (DFG).
Click here for the BUW press release.
New Paper (Jan 2022): National and organizational patterns of Nobel laureate careers in physiology/medicine, physics, and chemistry
This paper examines the distribution of Nobel laureates in Physiology/Medicine, Physics, and Chemistry across countries and research organizations. We provide basic information about where future laureates received their education and/or conducted their research, then present heat maps depicting country and organizational specialization patterns. In addition, we identify the organizational ultra-elite in science: universities and research institutes that show continuously above-average numbers of future laureates, typically in one career phase. Furthermore, we identify those universities and research institutes that have undergone considerable growth (or decline) in their capabilities for highly innovative research. Also, we compare country-specific profiles with those at the organizational level. Our findings are interpreted in the light of findings from comparative-historical studies.
