Evaluating Centres of Excellence - A Nordic perspective

To find out how best to evaluate excellence programmes, the Swedish Research Council has compared how such evaluations are done in other Nordic countries. The comparison shows that the methods vary between countries. In particular, it shows that mid-term evaluation has the greatest importance for this type of research funding, which is often referred to internationally as support for Centres of Excellence (CoE).

Long-term investments, where the funding bodies make repeated calls for funding of research proposals within the same excellence programme, increase the opportunities to achieve effective frameworks for follow-up and evaluation. This long-term approach provides clear incentives for higher education institutions to create structures for investment in centres of excellence. The long-term approach also provides incentives for follow-up systems that deliver data from the centres to the research funding bodies on an annual basis.