Possibilities and limitations of quantitative evaluations of research: a comparison between two university institutes

This article presents a study in which two university institutes were submi tted to a quantitative evaluation. It was the main goal of this examination to point out the possibilities and limitations of a quantitative evaluatio n of university institutes. For this reason, a multidimensional evaluation was conducted. The report of activities published by the institutes and var ious bibliographic databases (Inspec, SCI, HEP) were the sources for the da ta. The study concludes that a quantitative evaluation of university instit utes does not depend only on the underlying indicators but on the data sour ces as well. Therefore, a simplified and accelerated quantitative evaluatio n of an institute is only possible with some major restrictions. Concerning the determination of the research productivity figures, the main problem c onsists mainly of the different degrees of coverage of the databases. Furth ermore, many databases allow only a limited search for the affiliation.