The development of the “Forschungsmonitor” addresses two central problems of past DFG questionnaires:
First, the survey procedure has demanded an inordinate amount of effort on the part of the research training groups and collaborative research centers. Each year, the administrators or coordinators of the training groups has had to gather the necessary information from all their academics and integrate it in a uniform manner. This major undertaking has also been largely redundant because it necessitates an annual reprocessing of current information. The “Forschungsmonitor” relieves the administration of this burden by providing an ongoing platform in which only news and changes need to be addressed. It also allows the administration to have the academics themselves update their own biographical and publication data. Keeping one’s own information current is much less trouble some than following the past procedure.
The second problem tackled by the “Forschungsmonitor” is the relatively unstructured presentation of the reported data, which greatly complicates the effort to evaluate the performance of the funded research training groups and collaborative research centers in a detailed and discerning way. The research monitor therefore facilitates that work, for it is relevant to both cross-sectional and longitudinal comparison of these relatively stable institutions.

The research monitor serves this end by providing records on a variety of indicators: publications, conferences, awards, newly created university structures, and cooperation with other institutions.

One of the evaluation’s focal points will be bibliometric assessment. Publication data are immediately available, so ascertaining the impact of works (at least of articles appearing in professional journals) is made very easy.

Additional indicators are to complement this “classical” criterion of performance. One possibility in the collaborative research centers, for example, is to compare patent-related activities for their affiliation with specific scientific disciplines. Past investigations have encountered major methodological problems in this respect. A key issue before the abolishment of “professor’s privilege” (Inventors’ Law, §42 ArbErfG) was that universities did not hold patents themselves. The right to patent was granted to the professor (see, for example, Becher, Gereng, Lang, Paulus, Schmoch, 1996, especially p. 28, Noyons et al., 2003a, b; Schmoch, 2000, 2006).

Nor has there been any systematic documentation of awards as an indicator of the reputation of scientists working on projects (see, for example, FRST, 2004, p. 15).

The indexing of contributions to conferences, cooperative relations, and reciprocal research visits within such cooperative relations opens great opportunities for network analyses. Networking of institutions can be traced systematically and continuously. The role of regional centers of collaboration for the funded institutions can be assessed, as can the emergence, stabilization, and disintegration of cooperative relations over time. Past studies on such network formation between universities or between universities and companies have been confined to project-like, ad hoc data collection. Despite, or precisely because of, this relatively unsystematic approach, a veritable wave of studies has risen in recent decades (e.g., Castilla, Hwang, Granovetter, & Granovetter, 2000; Fritsch & Schwirten, 1999; Journal of Technology Transfer, 2002; Krücken, Meyer, & Müller, 2005; Leydesdorff, 2000; Müller, 2005; OECD, 1999; Saxenian, 1994; Sternberg, 2000; Stichweh, 2000; Teichler, 1999).

The mobility of university scholars has been the subject of inquiry for some time now (Blumenthal, Goodwyn, Smith, & Teichler, 1996; DAAD, 2005; KMK, 2002). The research monitor can extend these studies to include mobility in later periods of academic careers (especially the doctoral phase).

Work on the funding monitor parallels other iFQ projects calling to a great extent for similar, if not the same, technical solutions:
Although the FinSys Research Monitor records the data in a fundamentally different way, the subsequent analysis will be comparable to that provided by the funding monitor.
ProFile is a project tracing the career trajectories of doctoral students. It is based on various questionnaires that elicit information on aspects such as the impressions, problems, and objectives of these academics at different stages of their careers.

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