Disciplinary variation in academics’ preferences for change in recruitment criteria

Global reform initiatives have raised concerns about the narrow and strong reliance on publication-based metrics and have called for recognizing a broader range of academic contributions. Yet little is known about how such concerns are shared across the academic community, or how they vary between disciplines. Existing research also often focuses on a limited set of disciplines or aggregates them into broad field categories, potentially obscuring important variation. Drawing on a large-scale survey of academic staff across 22 disciplines at Norwegian universities this paper examines academics’ preferences for changes in recruitment criteria. The findings indicate a generally high level of satisfaction with the current practices, while also showing support for reduced reliance on bibliometric indicators and greater emphasis on teaching experience and personal qualifications. The results suggest that preferences for change are shaped by disciplinary context and highlight the need for research and policy to better account for fine-grained disciplinary diversity in research assessment.