On the Evaluation of Research in the Humanities, Particularly in Philosophy

In this article I examine the motivations of the present trend towards systematic evaluation of research in the humanities, particularly in continental Europe. I discuss some evaluation methods, such as evaluation based on the rating of journals and other media and citation indexing. I argue that, in the present situation, comparative evaluation of individual researchers can only be based on peer review, whereas the evaluation of research groups or departments could be effectively (and less expensively) done by semi-bibliometric methods.