Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration Commons^™

The tension between equity and excellence is fundamental in science policy. This tension might appear to be resolved through the use of merit-based evaluation as a criterion for research funding. This is not the case. Merit-based decision making alone is insufficient because of inequality aversion, a fundamental tendency of people to avoid extremely unequal distributions. The distribution of performance in science is extremely unequal, and no decision maker with the power to establish a distribution of public money would dare to match the level of inequality in research performance. We argue that decision-makers who increase concentration of resources because they …

This is a study of coverage and overlap in second generation social sciences and humanities journal lists with attention paid to curation and the judgment of scholarliness. We identify four factors underpinning coverage shortfalls: journal language, country, publisher size and age. Analysing these factors turns our attention to the process of assessing a journal as scholarly, which is a necessary foundation for every list of scholarly journals. Although scholarliness should be a quality inherent in the journal, coverage falls short because groups assessing scholarliness have different perspectives on the social science and humanities literature. That the four factors shape perspectives …

Understanding of structural change is compromised because scholars do not clearly articulate the limits of the classification infrastructure (NAICS or GICS) that shapes empirical analysis. These limits are particularly salient in the study of innovation, an activity that by its nature challenges existing categories. Because innovative industries are often not part of the classification infrastructure, they are invisible in empirical analyses and in government statistics. This paper examines the classification of a population of highly innovative, often small, firms working in gaming devices, packaging, filtration, photonics, imaging, biomedical research and fabless semiconductor design. I find examples of knowledge integration, vertical …