Review of the Research Institute for History and - Universiteit Utrecht

Table B.10 Percentage international academic publications 1997-2004 per programme
total international %
Ancient and Medieval Cultures 761 327 42,97%
Cultural Infrastructure and Intellectual Culture 362 63 17,40%
Cultural Construction of Media 194 126 64,95%
Arts, Culture and their Contexts 530 164 30,94%
Art History 315 120 38,10%
Literary Studies 668 273 40,87%
Oriental Studies 227 176 77,53%
International and Political History 415 121 29,16%
Social and Economic History 387 132 33,25%
Gender Studies 226 117 51,77%
OGC totaal 4,059 1,618 49,86%
There exist differences between groups in the relative levels of international publishing. To an important
extent this can be related to the specifi c characteristics of the various fi elds in which the groups operate;
oriental studies are almost by defi nition international, whereas this is not true for the study of Dutch history
and literature.
In terms of quantitative output, the period under review has been worrisome because of an almost persistent
decline of absolute and relative (quantitative) output. This decline must be attributed almost completely to
tenured faculty, if only for their relative weight: tenured faculty produces 8.9 academic publications/fte/year,
non-tenured faculty a mere1.9 academic publication/fte/year.
Table B.11a Academic publications, divided by tenured faculty research time (fte), 1997-2004
1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 average
16.98 16.62 15.66 11.00 13.18 11.85 12.41 10.29 13.50
The decline of output can be related to two more or less simultaneous developments in the teaching institutes
where tenured faculty (by far the most important producer of scholarly output) is employed. Since 1999
the number of students in the Faculty of Arts has been increasing substantially. Due to the university’s system
of budgeting, which is based on moving averages, and reinforced by cuts in overall government spending on
higher education in the Netherlands, funding for the Faculty has actually decreased between 2000 and 2004.
On top of this, Utrecht University introduced, in 2000, an ambitious new teaching format that has required
much extra effort in the development and teaching of undergraduate courses.
Breaking down output fi gures by research group (table B11b), shows that all groups experience the same
trend. The Media Studies group, with its small staff and large student numbers, is especially under pressure.
At the same time, the table suggests interesting variations. There is a certain tendency for smaller groups to
cluster in the higher ranges, whereas large groups tend to cluster in the lower ranges. This is especially true
for the Literary Studies group, which seems to suffer from a double impact of large size and low coherence
on the one hand, and large student numbers in the modern languages on the other. The strong performance
of Gender Studies, and Social and Economic History can be related to the small size and strong coherence
of these groups. The same is true for the Historical Literature section in the Arts, Culture and their Contexts
group. Likewise, the Ancient and Medieval Cultures group, despite its relatively large size, profi ts from a high
level of collaboration and strong identity. Interestingly, the Media Studies and Political and International
History groups have also performed well, despite having to cope with huge student numbers and related
381 Research Institute for History and Culture OGC
11