Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Collaborative Research on Aquaculture & Fisheries

No research program can enjoy long-run success without a periodic assessment of how it is performing and what factors influence success and failure. While most such assessments are informal and specific to a particular study, formal evaluations eventually become important at the program level. A formal analysis the same as an informal one in the sense of comparing research outputs with the inputs or efforts expended to achieve them (a “knowledge production function”). Approaches to research assessment thus differ only in how such outputs and inputs are to be understood, measured, and compared. To help solve these difficulties, we examine here a new approach to research assessment. The new method focuses directly on the information a research study has generated, enabling a more exact and more contemporaneous matching of that information to the skills, expenditures, and capital devoted to the study. We apply the approach to the 167 167 55 past and on-going aquacultural research investigations which AquaFish CRSP is pursuing in eleven countries.

NOP 11-293 (English)