Legal academics in Europe publish a wide variety of materials including books, articles and essays, in an assortment of languages, and for a diverse readership. As a consequence, this variety can pose a problem for the evaluation of academic legal research. This thought-provoking book offers an overview of the legal and policy norms, methods and criteria applied in the evaluation of academic legal research, from a comparative perspective.

This Handbook provides a comprehensive overview of current developments, issues and good practices regarding assessment in social science research. It pays particular attention to the challenges in evaluation policies in the social sciences, as well as to the specificities of publishing in the area.

Making a key contribution to the contemporary debate about methods in European legal research, this comprehensive book looks behind different methodologies to explore the institutional, disciplinary, and political conflicts that shape questions of ‘method’ or ‘approach’ in European legal scholarship. Offering a new perspective on the underlying politics of method, it identifies four core dimensions of methodological struggle in legal research – the politics of questions, the politics of answers, the politics of legal audiences, and the politics of the concept of law.

This insightful book explores the answers to two ongoing debates: how should societal impact of research be measured and to what extent national research evaluation systems are fit for purpose?

Bibliometrics and altmetrics are increasingly becoming the focus of interest in the context of research evaluation. The Handbook Bibliometrics provides a comprehensive introduction to quantifying scientific output in addition to a historical derivation, individual indicators, institutions, application perspectives and data bases. Furthermore, application scenarios, training and qualification on bibliometrics and their implications are considered.

Essays in honour of John Bell on the art of comparative law, focussing on the manner of 'legal development'.

The trend of measuring performances is global and pervasive. We all live in quantified societies, in which performances in an ever-growing array of fields–from education to health, work to credit, justice to consumption–are assessed and governed through quantitative techniques. While the disruption brought by the quantitative turn has been widely studied by social scientists, legal research on the issue is minimal. This book aims to fill the gap. The essays herein collected explore how performance measurements interact with the law in different regions and sectors, which legal effects they produce, and for whose benefit.