Abstract
The humanities and social sciences (HSS) are defined differently from one country to another, evidenced by the fact that even the worldwide classification scheme proposed by the ISCED of UNESCO does not apply to every country. In addition, there is often significant overlap between HSS disciplines. These facts make it difficult to do bilateral and multilateral comparisons of various HSS environments.
In Japan, most HSS researchers－nearly 9 out of 10－are employed by universities, especially private institutions. Funding for HSS research has slightly increased in recent years, with the country’s national universities receiving a larger share of monies than public and private institutions. Despite these increases, per capita HSS funding to the national universities has declined. One result of this trend has been an ever expanding funding gap between national and private universities.
University research and education evaluation measures are increasingly common in Japan and other world countries. While these measures have evolved to some degree among the natural science disciplines, those for the humanities and social sciences have not been sufficiently developed. It is commonly assumed that hard science evaluation methods should not be applied to the HSS disciplines. Instead, certain factors, such as strong country.specific cultural orientations, should be taken into consideration. Although bibliometrics are commonly used to measure both natural science and HSS contributions, available HSS indexes preferentially focus on journals from North America and Europe, especially those written in English.
HSS researchers are today increasingly faced with many challenges. These include changes in interdisciplinary collaborations and growing demands for accountability. Some countries have prioritized HSS research to make it more mission.oriented. In Japan, however, HSS research organizations are intensely discipline based, and widely understood to have not significantly contributed to efforts to overcome social problems. The reorganization of the national universities in Japan is proceeding with an emphasis on the evaluation of their output. If national universities are to be reorganized, efforts to do so should enhance their research quality without discouraging the creativity of individual researchers.
