Assessment Report 2019
D2.1 Assessment Report for DOWNLOAD (PDF)
The report, released in February 2019, presents the current situation in ten Alliance4Life institutions, which will be used as a baseline for monitoring future progress of the Alliance4Life. The Alliance4Life member institutions (anonymised for the purpose of the public deliverable) were compared on the following indicators: research excellence, knowledge transfer, funding, human resources, and core facilities. As the main conclusion, the Alliance4Life proposes to establish and promote indicators as a basis for the development of standardized performance monitoring and benchmarking in the EU.
In order to assess the gap in health research in the EU, the Alliance4Life institutions were also compared with three selected EU advanced health research institutions in terms of research excellence. Publication outputs were normalized for comparison to funding and human resource data. For this part of the benchmarking, publicly available data were used from the InCites database and institutional annual reports.
The main goal of the report was to identify the best performing institutions among Alliance4Life and to use their managerial practice as an inspiration for the Alliance4Life strategies. Therefore, the D2.1 Assessment Report also contains comments on good institutional practices, which is described in further detail in the D2.2 Inventory of Best Practice.
The key finding was that substantial differences exist in monitored data at each institution. This was due to traditional practice at each institution, as well as national evaluation systems and legislation. In spite of these differences and the heterogeneity of Alliance4Life, the best effort was made to collect data that were comparable and useful for having a baseline for monitoring further progress. Our experience clearly shows the need for the development of harmonized performance indicator sets, which is essential for any inter-institutional benchmarking of health R&I performance in the EU.