Authors: Stefan Hornbostel Susan Böhmer Bernd Klingsporn Jörg Neufeld Markus von Ins
Publish Date: 2008/11/13
Volume: 79, Issue: 1, Pages: 171-190
Abstract
The German Research Foundation’s DFG Emmy Noether Programme aims to fund excellent young researchers in the postdoctoral phase and in particular to open up an alternative to the traditional route to professorial qualification via the Habilitation venia legendiThis paper seeks to evaluate this funding programme with a combination of methods made up of questionnaires interviews appraisals of the reviews and bibliometric analyses The key success criteria in this respect are the frequency of professorial appointments plus excellent research performance demonstrated in the form of publications Up to now such postdoc programme evaluations have been conducted only scarcelyIn professional terms approved applicants are actually clearly better placed The personal career satisfaction level is also higher among funding recipients Concerning publications and citations some minor performance differences could be identified between approved and rejected applicants Nevertheless we can confirm that on average the reviewers indeed selected the slightly better performers from a relatively homogenous group of very highperforming applicants However a comparison between approved and rejected applicants did not show that participation in the programme had decisively influenced research performance in the examined fields of medicine and physics
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