RESSH2025 Conference

Research evaluation in social sciences and humanities: Reforming research assessment

RESSH2025 conference of the international association ENRESSH (European Network for Research Evaluation in the SSH) is organized 19-21 May, 2025, in Helsinki, Finland. It brings together specialists on various topics of research evaluation and research policy with a special focus on the social sciences, humanities and the arts (SSH).

The evolving landscape of research assessment is among the twenty key actions in the European Research Area 2020–2024 agenda. This priority has taken shape through the Towards a Reform of the Research Assessment System—Scoping Report, issued in 2021 by the European Commission, outlining objectives and principles for a renewed evaluation approach. In line with this, the European Council’s Conclusions on the Assessment of Research and the Implementation of Open Science of June 2022 stress the need to address limitations in current systems to better support the diversity of research outputs, foster interdisciplinary work and promote multilingualism, moving towards a more qualitative and inclusive evaluation model. The Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment (ARRA) and the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) provide a common direction for these efforts.

This shift calls for rethinking frameworks to better recognize the diverse contributions of researchers and institutions, aligning assessments with the evolving needs of science. Research assessment reform should incorporate a range of approaches, including epistemic, ethical, and legal considerations, as well as factors such as inclusiveness, open science, sustainability, and societal impact. This transformation involves not only revising measurement practices but also broadening our understanding of valuable and impactful research. Central to this effort is the role of infrastructure, which must support fair and transparent assessments aligned with open science and diverse research outputs. ENRESSH/EvalHum and its RESSH conference has been at the forefront of rethinking and improving research assessments for more than a decade by acting as a platform of scientific and policy exchange and empirical inquiry. The RESSH25 conference goes therefore back to its roots and links explicitly to the growing research assessment reform movement.

Find out more details here.