Portuguese research re-evaluated

To grant 322 scientific proposals for the next 5 years, the Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation [FCT] worked together with the European Science Foundation [ESF] for the first time. The distribution of funding raises questions concerning the future of some active physics groups.
The FCT, which is the primary funding body in Portugal, conducted an evaluation of research units across the country in all science fields and announced the first results this summer: 22% of the Portuguese units evaluated were…

Research performance in the United Kingdom

Physics may be not the most important field of research in the United Kingdom [UK] but its impact is significant. This is the conclusion of a report entitled “The UK’s performance in physics research”.

In April 2014, the UK Institute of Physics [IOP] together with the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council [EPSRC], and the Science and Technology Facilities Council [STFC] published a report on performance in physics research in the United-Kingdom based on bibliometrics and case studies. Science Metrix, an independent research…

Editorial — Reliable Research: Getting Science Right

Science is in the news a lot these days. This is not surprising, since there is interest from many quarters: from the public fascinated by contemporary research, to policy makers who wish to decide how best to allocate public funding to achieve particular goals.

A recent cover story of The Economist caught my attention and that of many in the scientific community. With the title of “Unreliable Research: Trouble at the lab”, the article makes the provocative and worrying claim that whilst we…

Assessment assessed

Physicists like numbers. We measure them, calculate them and use them to test experiment against theory.

Yet we also respect numbers. We appreciate their limitations and we take extreme care to educate students that numbers are open to misinterpretation. From the first years of university-level physics teaching we stress how measurements are affected by systematic and random errors and uncertainties, and we explain and distinguish the difference between accuracy (“truth”) and precision (“reproducibility”)…

June Executive Committee Meeting

The European Physical Society [EPS] Executive Committee met at the EPS headquarters, in Mulhouse, on 8-9 June this year. Following the 2011 strategy discussion – and the elections earlier this year – the committee is now composed of 13 members, eight of whom are new to the board this year.

The Executive Committee has finalised the EPS statement on the use of bibliometric indices during assessment…