Process diversity (in assessment)

Process diversity broadens ‘what counts’ in research assessment from outputs (papers, patents, datasets) to the wider range of activities a researcher actually does — peer review, mentoring, editorial work, community and public engagement, data curation, and research management. The concept sits alongside, but is distinct from, output diversity (recognising a broader range of output types such as software or datasets, not just journal articles): process diversity is about recognising a broader range of research activities, some of which never produce a discrete, citable output at all.

Where the concept comes from

The clearest statement of the principle is the Hong Kong Principles for Assessing Researchers’ fourth principle, which calls on institutions to ‘acknowledge a broad range of research activities’ including peer review and mentoring — see Hong Kong Principles (2020) for the full five-principle framework. CoARA’s Agreement includes, among its ten membership commitments, a commitment to recognise the diversity of researchers’ contributions and career paths rather than assessing on outputs alone — see CoARA.

Practical implementations

Narrative-CV formats operationalise process diversity directly. UKRI’s R4RI, for example, includes a dedicated module for ‘contributions to the development of others’ (capturing mentoring, supervision, and training activity) and one for ‘contributions to the wider research and innovation community’ (capturing peer review, editorial service, and community-building) — see narrative CV for the broader movement these formats belong to. A promotion-and-tenure or grant-review committee that explicitly instructs reviewers to weight a candidate’s peer-review record and mentoring load alongside their publication list — rather than treating that record as a tie-breaker or a ‘nice to have’ — is applying process diversity in practice.

Why it is harder to implement than it sounds

Outputs are relatively easy to count and compare; process contributions (a mentoring relationship, an editorial board term, a review workload) are heterogeneous, self-reported, and harder to verify or weight consistently across candidates. Implementing process diversity in practice therefore requires reviewers to make a genuine qualitative judgement about non-output contributions rather than defaulting back to a metrics-only shortcut, which is the same underlying tension DORA and CoARA both name for research assessment reform more broadly.

References

• Moher D. et al., ‘The Hong Kong Principles for assessing researchers: Fostering research integrity’, PLOS Biology 18(7), 2020.
• CoARA, ‘The Agreement’ (coara.eu).