Munich

Solid foundations: German universities, such as Heidelberg, are squaring up to a future rating system. Credit: UNIV. HEIDELBERG

To help students and researchers separate the wheat from the chaff, Germany's science council has proposed a rating system for the country's publicly funded research institutes.

At a meeting in Hamburg last week, the science council recommended that departments in up to 50 disciplines be regularly marked by independent experts. All German research organizations, including the Max Planck Society, have agreed to participate.

When fully established, probably in 2006, the ratings will be an easy way of comparing the strengths of different labs, says the science council.

Although the details have yet to be hashed out, grades are expected to be based on a seven-point scale and awarded once every five or six years. A department will receive the highest mark only if more than half of its research activities are considered to be of top international quality; the lowest mark will go to departments whose output falls below national standards. The science council is encouraging the development of both hard and soft indicators to be applied in varying degrees depending on the field, which should spare anthropologists and quantum physicists from being measured on the same criteria.

The ratings are likely to affect future funding decisions, but they are not meant to become the decisive factor. This will differentiate the system from one that currently exists in Britain — the Research Assessment Exercise, which uses grading to assign some government grants.

The British audits are thought to have improved the competitiveness of UK research, but critics say they are excessively expensive and time-consuming, and tend to overemphasize quantitative indicators (see Nature 418, 6; 2002 10.1038/418006a ).

Similar objections are bubbling up in Germany. “Rankings are very popular among politicians and the public, but they are never objective, and sometimes they are even detrimental to science,” says Wolfgang Baumeister, director of molecular structural biology at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Martinsried, near Munich. “They foster mainstream research and the hunt for short-term accomplishments instead of true innovation.”

The proposal is being backed by the DFG, Germany's main funding agency. An institute will be created in Bonn to develop and test rating methodologies, and a pilot project designed to score sociology and informatics departments is scheduled to start in 2005.