ABSTRACT
Measures of research productivity and quality are key components of academic life, and a successful academic career is heavily dependent on meeting quantified performance standards. For many years citation-based measures like the Impact Factor dominated the metrics landscape, but in the last two decades a swathe of new evaluation tools have emerged, including the h-index, ranked journal lists and altmetrics. While the effectiveness of these metrics is debatable across many disciplines, their use in the social sciences and humanities has attracted most criticism. This chapter is concerned with how early career academics are using and responding to evaluative metrics; their strategies and ambitions for the future, and their perceptions of how evaluative metrics influence their work. In-depth interviews with Australian academics in the social sciences and humanities allowed us to explore these questions and we are particularly interested in how competing ‘orders of worth’ come to the fore in these accounts, and how researchers negotiate rivalling demands and expectations. Drawing on Brandtner’s concept of ‘evaluative landscapes’, we suggest that metrics and indicators can be seen as signposts which are used to assess achievement and to navigate a pathway to an ‘idealised sense of self’.
