INSTITUTIONS AND THE MAP OF SCIENCE - MATCHING UNIVERSITY DEPARTMENTSAND FIELDS OF RESEARCH

It is an increasingly common practice within universities to use depar tments as units of research funding and there exists in the form of th e extensive British Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) a national fund ing system which is essentially tied to departments as units of analys is. Yet the interdisciplinary nature of modern scientific research, wh ere researchers in departments publish in journals across a range of f ields outside their nominal disciplinary affiliation, is an acknowledg ed 'norm' in the university research community. This paper uses comple te data for all Australian universities to explore the correspondence between the designations of departments and the designations of the fi elds and subfields to which members of these departments contribute th rough their publications. Previous studies of this aspect of knowledge production have centred primarily on micro-level data relating to par ticular specialities and departments. We suggest that the use of perfo rmance indicators at the level of university departments inevitably ob scures important features of modern research. Any attempt to introduce a system-wide evaluation of research based on the university departme nt would have particular disadvantages for interdisciplinary research and for those newer institutions which have not organised their academ ic structures along traditional departmental lines. We suggest in rela tion to research funding bodies, either internal or external to the un iversity, that there should be an increased use of field-coded researc h information. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.