The School of Business and Economics, aiming for high quality research, maintains an ambitious system of allocation of research funds, based on the assessment of output. Funds are translated to full time equivalents, which are distributed to departments, according to their members’ relative performance in terms of (research-based) publications. The comparative value of publications is measured through rankings of journals and publishers and (optionally) individual publications’ citations. Quality is favoured over quantity: the system comprises the rating of the five best publications of a researcher over the five past years.
The allocation of research funding
The research funding is meant for members of the scientific staff with an appointment on the account of the university or on a structural externally funded position. PhD students and post-docs are not entitled to research funding, other than the funding agreed upon at the start of their contract.
Entitlements to research funding are based on publication credits and expressed in percentages of full-time equivalents. A maximum of 50 percent can be allocated. The factor that translates publication credits into a specific percentage is determined each year anew. The percentage obtained ought to be multiplied with the employment factor (wtf), to arrive at the number of working hours to be dedicated to research.
Currently, a minimum of 0.6 publication credits have to be earned in order to qualify for research funding.
Rules for assessment
Journal publications
The ranking of the journals is based on the Article Influence Score, an advanced and robust measure for the average influence of articles in a journal that can be found on Web of Science (Additional Resources → Journal Citation Reports). Using journals’ article influence scores as indicator of quality offers researchers the autonomy to choose topics, research approaches, and publication targets.
A journal’s weight is derived from the Article Influence percentile among the overall corpus of journals in Web of Science. Starting from 2019, we use the three-year moving average of Article Influence Percentiles (AIPs) to smoothen fluctuations in these scores. For example, for publications in 2019, we will use the average of the AIP scores for 2017, 2018, and 2019. For older publications, we will continue to use the annual AIP score. For recent publications, we use the latest available moving average score. The scores since 2015 can be found .
To determine the journal’s weight, the percentile is first divided by 100, and then squared.
For a single-authored journal publication, the number of credits obtained is simply equal to the journal’s weight in the year that the article was published. With ≤10 authors, that weight is multiplied by 0.75 to obtain the number of credits, and with >10 authors that weight is multiplied by 0.1, when the contribution is done by a non-core author to obtain the number of credits.
Top journal publications may count one or two years longer. This recognizes that publications in top journals are a signal of high quality and have exceptional impact, yet require a long time to get accepted and are subject to high risks. Specifically, publications in journals with AIP 0.96 will count for six years and with AIP ≥0.97 for seven years, starting from the moment of online publication or final publication (depending upon the author’s preference). So, whereas regular papers published in 2020 may count for research time in the period 2021-2025, publications in journals with AIP ≥0.97 may count for the years 2021-2027). These extensions also hold for publications from earlier years, so you can profit one or two years longer from top journal publications from the past.
Book reviews are not included in the assessment. Other short journal publications - including editorials (for edited special issues), comments, very short notes, etc. - may qualify for inclusion provided they make a sufficient scientific contribution. Judgements are to be made by a temporary committee. The number of pages is of no consequence for the credits attributed.
Article-level citation-based score
Some publications outside top journals are highly cited and have a disproportionally high impact in their field. To recognize this and to stimulate attention for the impact of publications, you get the option to earn research time based upon citations for one article.
How does it work?
- For one publication, you have the option to choose either the AI percentile of the journal or the citation percentile of the publication, to calculate publication points.
- We use the citation-percentile as offered in (as these are not available in Web of Science). If you enter your name, a list of publications with the number of citations will appear. When you click on the title of the publication, you will see a new page with the metrics of the publication. You will find the percentile on the right. This reflects the percentile score of its citations as compared to articles of roughly the same age. Because Scopus contains more than twice as many journals as Web of Science, the citation-based percentile needs to be adjusted by doubling the distance to the top percentile (e.g., 0.96 becomes 0.92). This adjusted Scopus citation percentile (SCp) needs to be squared, just like AI percentiles, and multiplied by 0.75 for co-authored publications.
- The same 5-year window will be used.
- Articles need to have at least 10 Scopus citations as a minimum.
- The optional replacement of one journal-level score for an article-level score only holds for research time allocation, not for career track decisions. The career track has separate criteria for citations.
Books
The listed publishers are classified as A or B; publications with non-listed publishers receive no credits. Single-authored monographs receive 0.85 credits for an A publisher and 0.60 for a B publisher. These scores are multiplied by 0.75 in case of multiple authors. Dissertations receive 0.45 credits. In addition, dissertations that are reissued as monograph by a scientific publisher will be treated as such. Researchers can submit a maximum of one monograph for the allocation of research time.
| Publisher | Rating |
| Cambridge University Press (also USA) | A |
| Edward Elgar Publishing | B |
| Elsevier (including Academic Press) | A |
| Emerald Group Publishing | B |
| Harvard University Press | A |
| MIT Press Publishers Inc. | A |
| Oxford University Press | A |
| Palgrave Macmillan | B |
| Princeton University Press | A |
| Sage Publishing | A |
| Springer | B |
| Taylor and Francis (including Ashgate, CRS Press, Chapman & Hall and Routledge for humanities, social sciences, behavioural sciences, law and education) | B |
| University of Chicago Press | A |
| Blackwell-Wiley | A |
Summarising, the following credits are attributed:
| Publication | Ranking | Single author | Multiple authors |
| Journal | W=(AIp/100)2 | W | &Բ;0.75∙W
or if >10 authors: 0.1W |
| optional for one journal publication | W=(SCp – (100-SCp)) 2 | W | 0.75∙W |
| Dissertation |
| 0.45 | 0.45 |
| Monograph | A | 0.85 | 0.75∙0.85 |
| B | 0.60 | 0.75∙0.60 |
Additional rules and regulations
Optional transition to online publication dates
Researchers have the option to use the date your publication appears first online instead of the date they appear in an issue. This matters when there is a long time-lag between the first time a paper appears online (often soon after acceptance) and the moment it appears in a (paper) issue. If this option is chosen, the date of “first publication” as indicated on the journal’s website is decisive. The five-year window of evaluation will remain the same. Researchers have to inform SBE’s Research Office if they opt for moving to “online first” publication dates. This choice applies to all publications simultaneously and is permanent – it cannot be changed from year to year.
Publications need to be available open access to count (if possible)
To count for research time, publications have to be available open access, unless no route to do so is available. The open access requirement can be met through one of the following routes:
- golden route: publishing in full open-access journal (e.g., PLOS One);
- hybrid route: using the option to make a paper open access in a regular journal (e.g. covered by VSNU deals; see );
- fast green route: making it public in the VU repository by participating in the “You share, we take care” project. In this project, the VU library will automatically make publications open-access after six months; the only thing researchers need to do is to indicate their participation through See also the Q&A about “You share, we take care.”
This rule does not hold for:
- Books
- Publications created while the author was not at a Dutch university.
- Papers published before 2018.
- Papers published in the last six months of the most recent year (as the “You share, we take care” project uses a six-month embargo)
Datasets generated at VU have to be registered in Pure
For publications (from 2020 and later) that are based upon a dataset generated at VU, the dataset needs to be registered in Pure for the publication to count.
Please note that registration as dataset does not entail making the data public, nor storing it at a central location. Dataset registration only indicates the nature of the data, the place of storage, a contact person for the data, and possible way to get access. Those researchers who publish datasets along with a paper or in a discipline specific repository can link to those locations in their Pure registration. To maintain the autonomy of researchers we are not mandating to archive or publish it in one particular place.
This requirement does not apply to: (1) publications with no data (e.g. conceptual papers); (2) publications that reuse data from others; (3) data generated prior to employment at the VU; (4) data that is generated by co-authors not at the VU; (5) data that is owned by others or where agreements prohibit making any meta-information about the data public. When submitting your publications to SBE’s Research Office you can explain why compliance is irrelevant or impossible.
If you have any questions, you can ask our data steward Kacana Khadjavi Pour (k.c.khadjavipour@vu.nl ).
Regulations for pregnancy and maternity leave
Researchers who have been on a pregnancy and maternity leave during that period, are allowed to submit their five best publications over the past six years.
Regulations for part time researchers
The special regulations for part time researchers are set out in the table below. The principle underlying this ruling is that part time researchers can spend less time in producing scientific output, compared to full time colleagues, and are allowed under this regulation to double count their best publication(s). The extent to which publications can be double counted depends on the researcher's appointment and can be read from the table below.
| appointment fte (average) | 5 or more publications | 4 publications | 3 publications |
|
|
|
|
| 0.81-1.00 | 12345 | 1234 | 123 |
| 0.71-0.80 | 12344 | 1234 | 123 |
| 0.61-0.70 | 12334 | 12344 | 123 |
| 0.51-0.60 | 12234 | 12334 | 1233 |
| 0.50 and less | 11223 | 12234 | 1223 |
1= best publication
2= second best publication, etc.
When a researcher has less than 3 publications, the score will not be adjusted. The average appointment in fte will be calculated over the part of the 5-year period during which the researcher was appointed at the faculty.
Researchers who want to use this regulation must state this explicitly. They also have to show that they could not do any research outside the SBE-appointment (for example: a researcher who works for 0,5 fte at another faculty, is not allowed to appeal under this regulation.