Scientific excellence

Karin Grasenick, Julia Trattnig | 29 September 2021

Scientific excellence is primarily linked to scholarly productivity and thus to meritocracy.

This is the main reason for its reputation of neutrality and objectivity. Accomplishments, performances are perceived as objective merits that can be achieved by everybody.

“Academics must be judged on merit alone, and social categories (e.g. gender, race and class) should not matter”
(Brink/Benschop, 2011: 509).

However, accomplishments depend on specific preconditions, and they are evaluated differently.
For example, journal ranking systems rely on publications in English, thus not considering excellent publications in other languages.

“These biases are particularly problematic in the social sciences and humanities, in which research is more regionally and nationally engaged”
(Hicks et al. 2015: 430).

Van den Brink and Benschop highlight that scientific excellence must be understood as

“a social construction that is always embedded within a social context and is thus subject to multiple cultural and political influences”
(Brink/Benschop, 2011: 209).

Additional to the different fields of science, gender inequalities in academia can be observed in several areas:

• gaps in the proportion of women in scientific fields,
• compensation,
• grand funding,
• credit for collaborative work,
• teaching evaluations,
• hiring and promotions,
• authorship and citations.

These biases do not only concern women, but also other aspects, such as socioeconomic status, university prestige and race (Dworkin et al., 2020: 918).