On the quality evaluation of scientific entities in Poland supported by consistency-driven pairwise comparisons method

Scientometrics. 2014;99(3):911-926. doi: 10.1007/s11192-014-1258-y. Epub 2014 Mar 19.

Abstract

Comparison, rating, and ranking of alternative solutions, in case of multicriteria evaluations, have been an eternal focus of operations research and optimization theory. There exist numerous approaches at practical solving the multicriteria ranking problem. The recent focus of interest in this domain was the event of parametric evaluation of research entities in Poland. The principal methodology was based on pairwise comparisons. For each single comparison, four criteria have been used. One of the controversial points of the assumed approach was that the weights of these criteria were arbitrary. The main focus of this study is to put forward a theoretically justified way of extracting weights from the opinions of domain experts. Theoretical bases for the whole procedure are based on a survey and its experimental results. Discussion and comparison of the two resulting sets of weights and the computed inconsistency indicator are discussed.

Keywords: Academic entity quality; Expert opinion; Inconsistency analysis; Pairwise comparisons; Performance evaluation.