Sarah De Rijcke
Biographic Data
| ID | 238001 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sarah De Rijcke |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sarah |
| FAMILY NAME | De Rijcke |
| SIGNATURE | DE RIJCKE S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Leiden University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4652-0362 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 81 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 20 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Brackish knowledge
Estuaries, the dynamic transitional zones where rivers converge with oceans, represent complex ecosystems characterized by the mixing of fresh and saltwater, resulting in what is known as brackish water. These coastal interfaces, along with tidal flats and other littoral features, embody a unique duality, existing as neither fully terrestrial nor entirely marine environments. This ambiguous nature poses significant challenges for scientific inqui…
Diving into Relevance
The deep sea is many things: a subject of both fascination and indifference; a realm of great unknowns and scientific inquiry; and a source of untapped potential and looming exploitation. Its multifaceted nature is also visible in scientific research on the deep sea. While traditional relevance narratives in the field of deep sea research centred around fundamental knowledge creation, calls for doing societally relevant research are intensifying.…
The role of the social sciences in the quantified university. Response to The Quantified Scholar , by Juan Pablo Pardo‐Guerra
Ten ways to improve academic CVs for fairer research assessment
Academic CVs are ubiquitous and play an integral role in the assessment of researchers. They define and portray what activities and achievements are considered important in the scientific system. Developing their content and structure beyond the traditional, publication-focused CV has the potential to make research careers more diverse and their assessment fairer and more transparent. This comment presents ten ways to further develop the content …
Expanding Research Integrity
Research integrity (RI) is usually discussed in terms of responsibilities that individual researchers bear towards the scientific work they conduct, as well as responsibilities that institutions have to enable those individual researchers to do so. In addition to these two bearers of responsibility, a third category often surfaces, which is variably referred to as culture and practice . These notions merit further development beyond a residual ca…
From indicators to indicating interdisciplinarity
This article discusses a project under development called “Inventing Indicators of Interdisciplinarity,” as an example of work in methodology development that combines quantitative methods with interpretative approaches in social and cultural research. Key to our project is the idea that Science and Technology Indicators not only have representative value, enabling empirical insight into fields of research and innovation but simultaneously have o…
Temporality in Academic Evaluation
This paper builds on emerging concerns with how temporality and spatiality unfold in, and order, academic evaluation practices. We unpack how the notion of ‘trajectory’ – a simultaneously prospective and retrospective narrative device permeating contemporary academic evaluation discourses – is mobilized within a particular evaluation site. Materials for our study are drawn from reports commissioned by Swedish universities when hiring for new prof…
Algorithmic Allocation
Marketization and quantification have become ingrained in academia over the past few decades. The trust in numbers and incentives has led to a proliferation of devices that individualize, induce, benchmark, and rank academic performance. As an instantiation of that trend, this article focuses on the establishment and contestation of ‘algorithmic allocation’ at a Dutch university medical centre. Algorithmic allocation is a form of data-driven auto…
Filling in the gaps
In this article, we study the use of curricula vitae (CV) for competitive funding decisions in science. The typically sober administrative style of academic résumés evokes the impression of straightforwardly conveyed, objective evidence on which to base comparisons of past achievements and future potentials. We instead conceptualize the evaluation of biographical evidence as a generative interplay between an historically grown, administrative inf…
Variation in Valuation
Portfolios of Worth
How are "interesting" research problems identified and made durable by academic researchers, particularly in situations defined by multiple evaluation principles? Building on two case studies of research groups working on rare diseases in academic biomedicine, we explore how group leaders arrange their groups to encompass research problems that latch onto distinct evaluation principles by dividing and combining work into "basic-oriented" and "cli…
The Drawbacks of Project Funding for Epistemic Innovation
Over the past decades, science funding shows a shift from recurrent block funding towards project funding mechanisms. However, our knowledge of how project funding arrangements influence the organizational and epistemic properties of research is limited. To study this relation, a bridge between science policy studies and science studies is necessary. Recent studies have analyzed the relation between the affordances and constraints of project gran…
Implicated in the Indicator Game? An Experimental Debate
The rise of new modes evaluating academic work has substantially changed institutions and cultures of knowledge production. This has been reflected and criticized in the literature in STS and beyond. For STS scholars, these debates (should) however have an even more specific dimension. Many of us are experts on aspects of these changes. But at the same time, we too are part of the processes we are analyzing, and often criticizing. To put it sligh…
From Eminent Men to Excellent Universities
Global university rankings have become increasingly important 'calculative devices' for assessing the 'quality' of higher education and research. Their ability to make characteristics of universities 'calculable' is here exemplified by the first proper university ranking ever, produced as early as 1910 by the American psychologist James McKeen Cattell. Our paper links the epistemological rationales behind the construction of this ranking to the s…
Evaluation practices and effects of indicator use—a literature review
This review of the international literature on evaluation systems, evaluation practices, and metrics (mis)uses was written as part of a larger review commissioned by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) to inform their independent assessment of the role of metrics in research evaluation (2014–5). The literature on evaluation systems, practices, and effects of indicator uses is extremely heterogeneous: it comprises hundreds of …
Bibliometrics
Accounting for Impact? The Journal Impact Factor and the Making of Biomedical Research in the Netherlands
The range and types of performance metrics has recently proliferated in academic settings, with bibliometric indicators being particularly visible examples. One field that has traditionally been hospitable towards such indicators is biomedicine. Here the relative merits of bibliometrics are widely discussed, with debates often portraying them as heroes or villains. Despite a plethora of controversies, one of the most widely used indicators in thi…
Drawing into abstraction. Practices of observation and visualisation in the work of Santiago Ramón y Cajal
Santiago Ramon y Cajal's neurohistological work marked a turning point in ongoing debates on the morphology of the nervous system. From 1888 onwards, he published extensively on the anatomic unity of the nerve cell. His experiments with the chrome silver stain resulted in highly particular ways of seeing and visualising neurons. In the current article, Cajal's practices of manipulating, observing, and drawing tissue will be juxtaposed with his ph…
Essay Review
This review focuses on what scientific images can do, by considering three books in which they are central. We problematize the assumption that images can simply show and that the viewer can simply see what is at hand. Images are neither self-explanatory nor transparent, but rather partake in a specific visual culture. If they are to serve as bridges (e.g. to popularize scientific results), then they are only effective insofar as cultural convent…
The graphic strategy
Illustrations played an important role in the articulation of Wundt’s experimental program. Focusing on the woodcuts of apparatus and experimental designs in the six editions of his Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie (published between 1873 and 1911), we investigate the uses and functions of illustrations in the experimental culture of the physiological and psychological sciences. We will first present some statistics on the increasing num…
Accounting for Impact? The Journal Impact Factor and the Making of Biomedical Research in the Netherlands
The range and types of performance metrics has recently proliferated in academic settings, with bibliometric indicators being particularly visible examples. One field that has traditionally been hospitable towards such indicators is biomedicine. Here the relative merits of bibliometrics are widely discussed, with debates often portraying them as heroes or villains. Despite a plethora of controversies, one of the most widely used indicators in thi…
The Drawbacks of Project Funding for Epistemic Innovation
Over the past decades, science funding shows a shift from recurrent block funding towards project funding mechanisms. However, our knowledge of how project funding arrangements influence the organizational and epistemic properties of research is limited. To study this relation, a bridge between science policy studies and science studies is necessary. Recent studies have analyzed the relation between the affordances and constraints of project gran…
Variation in Valuation
From Eminent Men to Excellent Universities
Global university rankings have become increasingly important 'calculative devices' for assessing the 'quality' of higher education and research. Their ability to make characteristics of universities 'calculable' is here exemplified by the first proper university ranking ever, produced as early as 1910 by the American psychologist James McKeen Cattell. Our paper links the epistemological rationales behind the construction of this ranking to the s…
Portfolios of Worth
How are "interesting" research problems identified and made durable by academic researchers, particularly in situations defined by multiple evaluation principles? Building on two case studies of research groups working on rare diseases in academic biomedicine, we explore how group leaders arrange their groups to encompass research problems that latch onto distinct evaluation principles by dividing and combining work into "basic-oriented" and "cli…
Drawing into abstraction. Practices of observation and visualisation in the work of Santiago Ramón y Cajal
Santiago Ramon y Cajal's neurohistological work marked a turning point in ongoing debates on the morphology of the nervous system. From 1888 onwards, he published extensively on the anatomic unity of the nerve cell. His experiments with the chrome silver stain resulted in highly particular ways of seeing and visualising neurons. In the current article, Cajal's practices of manipulating, observing, and drawing tissue will be juxtaposed with his ph…
Filling in the gaps
In this article, we study the use of curricula vitae (CV) for competitive funding decisions in science. The typically sober administrative style of academic résumés evokes the impression of straightforwardly conveyed, objective evidence on which to base comparisons of past achievements and future potentials. We instead conceptualize the evaluation of biographical evidence as a generative interplay between an historically grown, administrative inf…
Diving into Relevance
The deep sea is many things: a subject of both fascination and indifference; a realm of great unknowns and scientific inquiry; and a source of untapped potential and looming exploitation. Its multifaceted nature is also visible in scientific research on the deep sea. While traditional relevance narratives in the field of deep sea research centred around fundamental knowledge creation, calls for doing societally relevant research are intensifying.…
The graphic strategy
Illustrations played an important role in the articulation of Wundt’s experimental program. Focusing on the woodcuts of apparatus and experimental designs in the six editions of his Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie (published between 1873 and 1911), we investigate the uses and functions of illustrations in the experimental culture of the physiological and psychological sciences. We will first present some statistics on the increasing num…
The graphic strategy
Illustrations played an important role in the articulation of Wundt’s experimental program. Focusing on the woodcuts of apparatus and experimental designs in the six editions of his Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie (published between 1873 and 1911), we investigate the uses and functions of illustrations in the experimental culture of the physiological and psychological sciences. We will first present some statistics on the increasing num…
Essay Review
This review focuses on what scientific images can do, by considering three books in which they are central. We problematize the assumption that images can simply show and that the viewer can simply see what is at hand. Images are neither self-explanatory nor transparent, but rather partake in a specific visual culture. If they are to serve as bridges (e.g. to popularize scientific results), then they are only effective insofar as cultural convent…
Drawing into abstraction. Practices of observation and visualisation in the work of Santiago Ramón y Cajal
Santiago Ramon y Cajal's neurohistological work marked a turning point in ongoing debates on the morphology of the nervous system. From 1888 onwards, he published extensively on the anatomic unity of the nerve cell. His experiments with the chrome silver stain resulted in highly particular ways of seeing and visualising neurons. In the current article, Cajal's practices of manipulating, observing, and drawing tissue will be juxtaposed with his ph…
Bibliometrics
Accounting for Impact? The Journal Impact Factor and the Making of Biomedical Research in the Netherlands
The range and types of performance metrics has recently proliferated in academic settings, with bibliometric indicators being particularly visible examples. One field that has traditionally been hospitable towards such indicators is biomedicine. Here the relative merits of bibliometrics are widely discussed, with debates often portraying them as heroes or villains. Despite a plethora of controversies, one of the most widely used indicators in thi…
Evaluation practices and effects of indicator use—a literature review
This review of the international literature on evaluation systems, evaluation practices, and metrics (mis)uses was written as part of a larger review commissioned by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) to inform their independent assessment of the role of metrics in research evaluation (2014–5). The literature on evaluation systems, practices, and effects of indicator uses is extremely heterogeneous: it comprises hundreds of …
Implicated in the Indicator Game? An Experimental Debate
The rise of new modes evaluating academic work has substantially changed institutions and cultures of knowledge production. This has been reflected and criticized in the literature in STS and beyond. For STS scholars, these debates (should) however have an even more specific dimension. Many of us are experts on aspects of these changes. But at the same time, we too are part of the processes we are analyzing, and often criticizing. To put it sligh…
From Eminent Men to Excellent Universities
Global university rankings have become increasingly important 'calculative devices' for assessing the 'quality' of higher education and research. Their ability to make characteristics of universities 'calculable' is here exemplified by the first proper university ranking ever, produced as early as 1910 by the American psychologist James McKeen Cattell. Our paper links the epistemological rationales behind the construction of this ranking to the s…
The Drawbacks of Project Funding for Epistemic Innovation
Over the past decades, science funding shows a shift from recurrent block funding towards project funding mechanisms. However, our knowledge of how project funding arrangements influence the organizational and epistemic properties of research is limited. To study this relation, a bridge between science policy studies and science studies is necessary. Recent studies have analyzed the relation between the affordances and constraints of project gran…
Filling in the gaps
In this article, we study the use of curricula vitae (CV) for competitive funding decisions in science. The typically sober administrative style of academic résumés evokes the impression of straightforwardly conveyed, objective evidence on which to base comparisons of past achievements and future potentials. We instead conceptualize the evaluation of biographical evidence as a generative interplay between an historically grown, administrative inf…
Variation in Valuation
Portfolios of Worth
How are "interesting" research problems identified and made durable by academic researchers, particularly in situations defined by multiple evaluation principles? Building on two case studies of research groups working on rare diseases in academic biomedicine, we explore how group leaders arrange their groups to encompass research problems that latch onto distinct evaluation principles by dividing and combining work into "basic-oriented" and "cli…
From indicators to indicating interdisciplinarity
This article discusses a project under development called “Inventing Indicators of Interdisciplinarity,” as an example of work in methodology development that combines quantitative methods with interpretative approaches in social and cultural research. Key to our project is the idea that Science and Technology Indicators not only have representative value, enabling empirical insight into fields of research and innovation but simultaneously have o…
Temporality in Academic Evaluation
This paper builds on emerging concerns with how temporality and spatiality unfold in, and order, academic evaluation practices. We unpack how the notion of ‘trajectory’ – a simultaneously prospective and retrospective narrative device permeating contemporary academic evaluation discourses – is mobilized within a particular evaluation site. Materials for our study are drawn from reports commissioned by Swedish universities when hiring for new prof…
Algorithmic Allocation
Marketization and quantification have become ingrained in academia over the past few decades. The trust in numbers and incentives has led to a proliferation of devices that individualize, induce, benchmark, and rank academic performance. As an instantiation of that trend, this article focuses on the establishment and contestation of ‘algorithmic allocation’ at a Dutch university medical centre. Algorithmic allocation is a form of data-driven auto…
Ten ways to improve academic CVs for fairer research assessment
Academic CVs are ubiquitous and play an integral role in the assessment of researchers. They define and portray what activities and achievements are considered important in the scientific system. Developing their content and structure beyond the traditional, publication-focused CV has the potential to make research careers more diverse and their assessment fairer and more transparent. This comment presents ten ways to further develop the content …
Expanding Research Integrity
Research integrity (RI) is usually discussed in terms of responsibilities that individual researchers bear towards the scientific work they conduct, as well as responsibilities that institutions have to enable those individual researchers to do so. In addition to these two bearers of responsibility, a third category often surfaces, which is variably referred to as culture and practice . These notions merit further development beyond a residual ca…
The role of the social sciences in the quantified university. Response to The Quantified Scholar , by Juan Pablo Pardo‐Guerra
Brackish knowledge
Estuaries, the dynamic transitional zones where rivers converge with oceans, represent complex ecosystems characterized by the mixing of fresh and saltwater, resulting in what is known as brackish water. These coastal interfaces, along with tidal flats and other littoral features, embody a unique duality, existing as neither fully terrestrial nor entirely marine environments. This ambiguous nature poses significant challenges for scientific inqui…
Diving into Relevance
The deep sea is many things: a subject of both fascination and indifference; a realm of great unknowns and scientific inquiry; and a source of untapped potential and looming exploitation. Its multifaceted nature is also visible in scientific research on the deep sea. While traditional relevance narratives in the field of deep sea research centred around fundamental knowledge creation, calls for doing societally relevant research are intensifying.…
Computer Science (15 works) · Sociology (15 works) · Epistemology (12 works) · Political science (10 works) · scientometrics and bibliometrics research (9 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Law (6 works) · Doctoral Education Challenges and Solutions (5 works) · Economics (5 works) · Engineering (5 works)