Abstract
In the early 1990s, the German Research Foundation established a new form of graduate education: the so-called Research Training Groups (RTGs). Comparable to PhD programmes in the US, RTGs offer a structured course-programme and a framework for collaborative research for young researchers who are to be integrated in the research activities and the scientific networks of the participating institutions. As a result, the time span needed to complete a doctorate was expected to decrease and the scientific visibility of doctoral and post-doctoral research was held to increase. However, the performance of German RTGs has not been evaluated as yet. In this chapter, we undertake a first step in that direction and assess the performance of German RTGs in different disciplines (humanities social sciences vs. natural life sciences) in two important respects: (1) Doctoral degrees as an immediate outcome of the graduate teaching undertaken and (2) scientific visibility of doctoral and post-doctoral students as measured by their publication output (supplemented by data on presentations). In our analysis of 86 German RTGs we present first empirical data on the two measures and are able to show that the performance of German RTGs varies considerably in and between the different disciplines. An additionally performed data envelopment analysis (DEA) reveals that even though a considerable share of RTGs operates at relative efficiency, there still seems to be remarkable potential for performance improvement.
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Notes
- 1.
As the RTGs reported on varying time spans (partly as a result of the varying length of funding periods), we normalized all measures on a year basis.
- 2.
Besides doctorates and scientific visibility, another possible measure to assess the performance of RTGs would be the placement rate of RTG students. As we do not have any information about the career paths of former RTG students, we refer to the contribution of Schneider et al. (2010) in this monograph who investigate the placement rate of selected economics departments in an international comparison.
- 3.
While one of these RTGs reports on a time span as short as 5 months (which may well result in an underrepresentation of its performance), this is not true for the other RTGs with a doctoral completion rate of 0 who report on time spans in the range of comparable RTGs with significant doctoral degree completion rates.
- 4.
Whenever the number of co-authors was not specified in the research reports but the expression “et al.” hinted at a joint production of publication outputs, we supplemented our data from the RTG research reports by information gathered from the internet.
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Financial support by the German Research Foundation as well as support concerning the collection of the data is gratefully acknowledged.
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Unger, B., Pull, K., Backes-Gellner, U. (2010). The Performance of German Research Training Groups in Different Disciplinary Fields – An Empirical Assessment. In: Jansen, D. (eds) Governance and Performance in the German Public Research Sector. Higher Education Dynamics, vol 32. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9139-0_5
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