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Persons (authors)

The evaluation of research at Charles University strives to obtain information on the quality of research within individual fields, research areas, and units. On the other hand the evaluation does not seek to assess individual departments, teams or even individual authors, since this is within the competence of faculties and higher education institutes themselves.

For more robust evaluation of research fields/units, it is important to provide the panels and the Board with the information on the number of academic staff and other CUNI affiliates with specific field or research area. The information is necessarily only an approximation, since researchers are often associated with more research fields/areas and their assignment to fields has been undertaken only in order to carry out the evaluation. Therefore, it has to be taken with a grain of salt and only semi-quantitatively.

Auxiliary categories

Depending on the type of relationship with the university, the following auxiliary categories of persons are distinguished:

  • Core staff [Core*], i.e. academic and research staff with involvement rate (i.e. average FTE workload over the evaluation period) equal to or higher than 50%;

  • Non core staff [Contract*], i.e. academic and research staff with involvement rate (i.e. average FTE workload over the evaluation period) lesser than 50% who were involved in research over the evaluation period or the unit decided that they may be involved in research in the future;

  • Others [Other*], especially other employees and undergraduate students who do not meet the abovementioned criteria but were involved in research over the evaluation period or the unit decided that they may be involved in research in the future.

  • Doctoral students [PhD st.*], i.e. persons with "doctoral student" status at any time during 2014-18 who do not meet the criteria to be counted as core staff;


* codes used in the Bibliometric report

Persons in bibliometric analysis

The main source of data on persons for the panels and the Board is the Bibliometric report:

  • The Structural reports (units and evaluated fields) provide the total headcounts of all persons (CUNI affiliates who met criteria for one of the auxiliary categories listed above whether they authored an output during the evaluation period or not), their counts in each category (see below) and their gender and age composition.

  • The Comparative reports provide numbers for authors only (i. e. persons who authored at least one output during the evaluation period and it is registered in the Web of Science), as they use data from national and international databases, which don't include persons who haven't authored any outputs.

Note on authors in the regulations

Academics, researchers, students, and other employees of the University who conduct research and publish its results or are supposed to do so, are referred to as authors within the relevant University regulations. (Czech Higher Education Act stipulates that the academic staff should carry out both teaching and research and that doctoral degree programmes are aimed at scientific research and independent research).

Assigning persons to individual research fields

  • Every person who met criteria for one of the auxiliary categories listed above must be assigned to at least one and no more than three fields. If he or she qualifies for assignment at several units, this limitation applies to each of them individually, and the author may be assigned to the same or different academic fields at the respective units depending on the actual situation.

  • All the fields into which the author is assigned are considered equal, i.e have the same weight.

  • Individual units that are subject to evaluation are responsible for assigning their employees and students to academic fields. It is their evaluation coordinator's duty to ensure uploading all the assignments to the IS Veda system so that the Expert Panels and the Research Evaluation Board are able to carry out the evaluation.