An Unfair Game: The Dilemmas Posed by Academic Research Evaluation to Sociological Book Writing in Taiwan

Autor: Tien-Hsin Chang, Chi-Shiou Lin
Jazyk: English<br />Chinese
Rok vydání: 2017
Předmět:
Zdroj: Jiàoyù zīliào yǔ túshūguǎn xué, Vol 54, Iss 2, Pp 135-160 (2017)
Druh dokumentu: article
ISSN: 1013-090X
DOI: 10.6120/JoEMLS.2017.542/0007.RS.BM
Popis: Scholarly books, or scholarly monographs, are an important form of research output in humanities and social sciences. However, the current research evaluation practices in Taiwan highly emphasize journal articles and have thereby suppressed the production of scholarly books. This study employed in-depth interviews with 14 Taiwanese sociologists who had written and published scholarly books to understand the problems and challenges facing scholarly monograph production in the contemporary research evaluation culture. Interview topics included the values and contributions of scholarly books to the studies of sociology, the negative influences of journal-focused research evaluations on the sociology discipline, problems and challenges facing book-writing sociologists, and possible solutions to those problems. Based on the findings, the authors discuss on the proposed research review approach that monitors an author’s book-writing progress rather than focusing on the end-product, as raised in the interviews, as well as the problems and reliability issues with the pre-publishing anonymous review requirement that has become a mandate for scholarly book publishing in Taiwan.
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