EERQI

Project coordinator: Prof. Dr. Ingrid Gogolin, University of Hamburg
 
Upon instigation of the European Educational Research Association (EERA) and its members, the University of Hamburg, under the supervision of Professor Ingrid Gogolin, submitted a project entitled European Educational Research Quality Indicators (EERQI) in the 7th Framework Programme of European Union.

EERQI was funded as a small collaborative project with 1,494,564.00  Euro and officially began on 1 April 2008 for a three year period.
 
The Project was carried out by a Consortium of 19 Institutions, including two international and two national learned societies in educational research, as well as departments of education at European universities, computer and documentation centers, and publishers of educational research.

EERQI will build an advanced prototype framework for relevance assessment of research publications in educational research. This will be based on formal mechanisms including citation analysis and linking, semantically-based full text analysis and co-occurrence of information items in open access and non-open access repositories. Journal articles, books and other freely-available scholarly publications are included.
 
Educational research has been chosen as an example of research in socially- and politically-embedded fields within the humanities and social sciences.
 
The resulting prototype framework of quality indicators and methods will provide the base toolset for a European information service for evaluation of educational research publications and can be applied to other social sciences and humanities fields. Complementary to traditional measurements of scientific quality (citation analysis, journal impact factor), new methods and indicators of quality assessment will be tested (usage assessments, versions available, other statistical methods, as well as by means of advanced, semantics-based detection of linking, correlations and referral contexts).

EERQI results will raise visibility and competitiveness of European researchers and contribute to new policy bases for funding, hiring, and evaluation decisions in European academic and research institutions.

The project will also address the complex role of the diversity of scientific languages in Europe. Different mother tongues can be a barrier to the international flow of communication, but they are at the same time fundamental to expressing complex scientific ideas which are often embedded in a certain research tradition and cultural back-ground.
Thus the project will also address the challenge of effectively dealing with multilingualism and specific 'cultural heritage' of research traditions in the European countries.