During the past decades, the assessment of scholarship has gained more and more interest, both from science policy officials, research managers, and active scholars in all disciplines of science and scholarship. More and more countries implement evaluation models of their scholarly institutions at a national level, and scholarly institutions increasingly develop internal assessment processes of their personnel, departments and programs. At the same time, there is an increasing interest in evaluating the effects of these assessment processes and the development of best practices.

Scholarly Assessment Reports publishes commissioned reports, full research articles, multi-disciplinary research papers and short communications on the quantitative or qualitative assessment of scientific-scholarly activity, performance and communication for broad scholarly and policy audiences. The mission of this journal is to enhance knowledge on the potential and limits of scholarly assessment methodologies, in order to establish optimal conditions for an informed, responsible, effective and fair use of such methodologies in actual scholarly assessment practices.

The currently available, international journals in related subject fields such as scientometrics and informetrics, higher education research and the like, tend to be primarily directed towards experts in these fields (mainly bibliometricians, statisticians etc.). The key characteristic of Scholarly Assessment Reports is that it does not primarily aim to capture the methodological communication among experts in these various supporting fields, but rather the transfer of knowledge from the developers of scholarly assessment methodologies to those who apply such methodologies.

Although the professional evaluation community is one of the journal’s target audiences, Scholarly Assessment Reports also aims to inform scholars who conduct assessments in their daily research practices, or to those who are undergoing assessment and wish to become better informed about the pros and cons of the various methodologies and indicators. It offers a platform for users of assessment methodologies to identify best practices, but also for those who undergo assessment to share their experiences.

Scholarly Assessment Reports covers all aspects of scholarly performance. The journal aims to include, in addition to contributions on research assessment, studies that examine other types of activities conducted by scholars and scientists, including teaching and social services. It is important to note that the journal does not assign a preferred status to any particular disciplinary viewpoint, assessment methodology or practical application. Therefore, significant contributions from relevant disciplines such as social, historical and political sciences about scholarly assessment are also welcome.

The journal offers a platform the exploration of multi-disciplinary approaches to the study of scholarly assessment and performance. The journal’s editorial board evaluates submissions according to their scholarly merit and to their policy relevance. To the extent that a submitted manuscript presents a knowledge claim from some specialist domain, the degree of support of this claim in the relevant specialist literature will be assessed. The policy or managerial relevance of an issue will be considered as a separate criterion in its own right.

On behalf of my colleague members of the Editorial Board, Gali Halevi, David Pendlebury, Michael Khor and Christine Burgess, I would like to invite all interested authors to submit a short communication or full paper to Scholarly Assessment Reports. More information for submitting authors can be found on the journal’s website.