The Effective Trends and Driving Forces in The Future of Research Performance Evaluation Based on Scoping Review and Interview

In this qualitative study, the trends analysis based on scoping review and interview used to identify the driving forces affecting the future of research performance evaluation. MAXQDA version 10 and thematic analysis were used to analyze the interviews and documents. The social trends included the research social impact, the social development of society, increasing researchers’ awareness of the research evaluation importance, lack of research culture in society, the gender gap in society, and employing human resources. The technological trends were the development of information and communication technology, scientometric indicators, and open science. The economic trends and driving forces included not emphasize on the oil economy merely, research grant, economic evaluation of research, and research budget. The environmental trends and driving forces were increased emphasis on green information, using the green environment components in research institutes, and a favorable organizational environment. The political trends and driving factors included scientic diplomacy, a country's domestic policy, war and political sanctions, research performance evaluation system, optimal research policy, and increased research collaboration. The results showed that various social, technological, economic, environmental, and political factors and indicators must be included and normalized in the national and international research performance evaluation system.


Introduction
Performance is a multidimensional concept and evaluated by different criteria (Ford & Schellenberg, proper research policy-making requires identifying the emerging trends and factors in uencing the research and the research performance evaluation. However, the most important concern in this eld is to identify effective trends and driving forces that can affect the future of research performance evaluation.
In other words, the process of research performance evaluation will change in the future under the in uence of which trends and driving forces is the most important issue that must be answered. This research seeks to answer these questions that determine the effective trends and driving forces in the future of research performance evaluation.

Methods
In this qualitative study, the trend analysis used to identify the driving forces affecting the future of research performance evaluation. These forces have an indirect effect on the research performance evaluation in the long run. The scoping review of documents and the interview with experts done to analyze these trends. The qualitative trends analysis emphasizes social, technological, economic, environmental, and political driving forces and trends based on STEEP. The scoping review was conducted according to the "Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for scoping reviews"(PRISMA-ScR) guideline (Tricco et al., 2018). The research community in this stage included all related gray literature and articles in Iranian databases, Magiran, Iranian Research Institute for Information Science and Technology (IranDoc), Scienti c Information Database, Barakat Knowledge Network System as well as available international databases such as Web of Science, Scopus, Pubmed, Embase, Proquest databases, Library Information Technology Association (LITA), Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts (LISTA), Springer databases, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) along with the Google Scholar search engine at January 2020. Inclusion criteria for the scoping review were: Gray literature and articles that study social, technological, economic, environmental, political and macro trends or driving forces related to the research performance evaluation; Published in Persian or English languages; Available full-text of the document.
Exclusion criteria for this review were: Descriptive scientometrics and bibliometric studies without emphasizing these trends; Letter to editors, reports, commentary, and notes.
Studies in other languages than Persian or English; Lack of access to the full text of the document.
The data collection tool for the scoping review was a data extraction form. The research team designed this form in four parts. The rst part included the assigning code to each article with the abbreviation D plus the number. For example, D1 means that it's the rst full-text document. The bibliographic details for each document in the second part included the title, the rst author, the publication year, the place of study, and the research method. The third and fourth parts included the trends and the main results related to the impact of these trends and drivers on the research performance evaluation respectively. The sample search strategy on the Web of Science database is as follows: (TS=("research performance") OR TS=("research performance assessment*") OR TS=("research performance evaluati*") OR TS=("research performance measurement*") OR TS=("research performance ranking*") OR TS=("research evaluati*") OR TS=("research assessment*") OR TS=("research measure*") OR TS=("research evaluation system*") OR TS=("research indicator*") OR TS=("research metric*")) AND (TS=(scientometric*) OR TS=(bibliometric*) OR TS=(informetric*)) AND (TS=("social trend*") OR TS= ("economical trend*") OR TS=("political trend*") OR TS=("technological trend*") OR TS=("environment* trend*") OR TS=(trend*) OR TS=("driving force*") OR TS=(determinant*) OR TS=(factor*)) The search strategy was con rmed and replicated by two other members of the research team. Then, the search results were downloaded to EndNote Edition 8. After deleting the duplicate items, the two researchers screened the title and abstract of the documents based on the inclusion and exclusion criteria. The two researchers resolved the con ict through negotiations. Otherwise, a third researcher decided to include an article in the study or not. The quality assessment of studies wasn't performed due to the type of review that was scoping review. The researchers get the full-text of documents by searching in the databases, search engines, social networks like ReasearchGate, and sending an e-mail to authors.
In the interview phase based on the purposeful and heterogeneous sampling, 11 experts out of 20 ones entered to the study. Table 1 shows the number and characteristics of participants in the study. Inclusion At least two-years work experience in the library and information science, medical library and information science, scientometrics, and the medical or non-medical research performance evaluation; Availability and responsiveness; Having the scienti c outputs published in the eld of scientometrics and medical or non-medical research performance evaluation, and the educational experience in this regard; . In this section, the mobile phone voice recorder (the voice recording program installed on the mobile phone for telephone-based interviews) and the interview guideline were used. The interview guide was designed based on the literature review and the research objectives for the semi-structured interviews. The research team deleted the shortcomings of this guideline. The guideline consisted of 19 questions and four sections of personal and work experience information, existing challenges of the research performance evaluation, trend analysis, and intellectual models. Six experts were interviewed face-to-face, two by telephone, and two by WhatsApp (done by N.S in January to March 2020).
The time allocated for interviews ranged from 13 to 51 minutes. After recording each interview and listening to them, one of the researchers wrote them exactly in the Microsoft Word 2016 edition. The interviewing continued until the data was saturated. The participants that didn't like to continue the interview at any stage, were excluded from the study. The interviews were coded with the letter "M" and the number to maintain the con dentiality of the data. MAXQDA version 10 and thematic analysis were used to analyze the interviews. So, the social, technological, economic, ecological, and political trends related to the research performance evaluation based on the scoping review and interviews were extracted and re-categorized based on semantic similarity and thematic overlap. We have reported the main and sub-categories of these trends and driving forces in the results.

Results
In this section, the results of the environmental scanning of trends and its relationship with the research performance evaluation based on the scoping review and the intellectual models of experts are presented. In the scoping review step, related keywords were combined into a search strategy for each of the nine English databases and four Iranian databases, and the Google scholar. Figure 1 shows the process of selecting documents for the scoping review. The descriptive speci cations of each document are reported in Appendix 1 (44 documents). The titles and abstracts of these documents were screened and approved by two researchers. Based on the type of review, the quality assessment was not performed.
In the interview analysis, the trends and driving forces based on initial coding and merging the similar codes were determined, and the unrelated codes dropped. Finally, 248 codes were assigned in the form of nine main categories, 64 subcategories, and 47 dimensions (Appendix 2). The trends included social, technological, economic, environmental, and political ones. The following tables show the results of trend analysis based on the scoping review and interview (Tables 2 to 6) A. Social trends and driving forces In this section, the social trends and driving forces affecting the future of research performance evaluation, as well as the evidence obtained from the interviews and the scoping review are presented (Table 2). The productivity of both men and women has increased based on scienti c rankings, and there was no difference between them. Women are less productive in the middle of their careers than men, and women will promote later. Women produce fewer but higher quality articles. In the future, a more balanced distribution of women in each academic rank will occur (Mauleón, Bordons, & Oppenheim, 2008).
Despite the control of personal and organizational factors, there is a lot of difference between male and female researchers in terms of publication in journals with high impact. Gender differences in research productivity decrease over time. Controlling personal and organizational factors reduces the impact of gender on the research performance (Mayer & Rathmann, 2018).

Organizational factors
Some factors such as changing the staff selection process, age structure, educational load, relationship between education and research, and research management programs affect research performance (Soo, 2008).

B. Technological trends and driving forces
In this section, the technological trends and driving forces affecting the future of research performance evaluation, as well as the evidence obtained from the interviews and the scoping review are presented (Table 3). Increased use of data mining "The evaluation systems seem to be becoming more professional in data analyzing, you know the analytical data, in fact, more advanced results, which may have extracted by data mining or machine learning." M 5 Increased use of arti cial intelligence "In the future, I think it will go toward arti cial intelligence. One of the things that can be done manually now, for example, statistical analysis can be done using a computer and arti cial intelligence. Tools related to science mapping and information illustration are getting better" M 4

Scientometric indicators
Not using of problemoriented metrics "Therefore, it is essential to note that social trends are so important. The indicators that exist in this area should be extracted and used anyway." M 8  The organizational depositories increase the citation because of free access to the publications of an university (Bonilla-Calero, 2014).

C. Economic trends and driving forces
In this section, the economic trends and driving forces affecting the future of research performance evaluation, as well as the evidence obtained from the interviews and the scoping review are presented (Table 4).  "In the current situation, foreign organizations do not even give us a research budget. We face a scienti c sanction, that we will see its full effect in two or three months." M 1 The younger grant recipients in countries with lower research performance have a lower diversity of research outputs and collaboration networks (Ghaseminik & Gazni, 2019). "Given the limited nancial resources for research around the world, it is possible that in the future, organizations, corporations, and research funding providers, will move to assign the research resources based on the research performance. if this happens, the position of these rankings and research performance evaluation systems will become more prominent." M 5 A combined research evaluation system can be effective in allocating funds, one based on performance (motivating) and the other on an institutional size to reduce costs (Geuna & Martin, 2003

D. Environmental trends and driving forces
In this section, the environmental trends and driving forces affecting the future of research performance evaluation, as well as the evidence obtained from the interviews and the scoping review are presented ( Table 5).

E. Political trends and driving forces
In this section, the political trends and driving forces affecting the future of research performance evaluation, as well as the evidence obtained from the interviews and the scoping review are presented (Table 6). The research evaluation based on e ciency, effectiveness, or scienti c productivity has not considered now. In my opinion, more emphasis will be placed on these issues in the future." M 6 The importance of the macro research policy in a country "I think the rst thing is to have a macro national research policy. We have de ned educational policy to some extent for example, in the Ministry of Health. But at a higher level, we must have a macro policy, and then this will be announced to the other organizations." M 7 The existence of a national strategic research plan and the scienti c national and international collaboration can be effective in the research performance of research centers (Ebadifar et al., 2017).
The importance of the research impact In the future, instead of articles and their metrics, we will focus more on the nal research products such as commercialized products, patents, or a change in a country's health system and using their related There are also many organizations in the world and even in the countries that are responsible for evaluating research performance and have created a kind of parallel work. So that each of them uses different criteria and indicators based on their goals, which may be different in many countries. Therefore, it is necessary for each country to determine its strategic research performance evaluation plan and research policy and develop its national research performance evaluation system that evaluates its researchers in individual, organizational, national, and also at the international levels. Finally, we encountered some limitations in our research. One of the limitations was the lack of access to the full text of some articles in the scoping review step, which was requested through correspondence with their authors on social networks and sending E-mails. In the interview step, due to the Coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic and the lack of face-to-face interview situations, WhatsApp and telephone interviews were used.

Conclusion
This study aimed to determine the effective trends and driving forces in the research performance evaluation through scoping reviews and interviews. The results showed that various social, technological, economic, ecological, and political factors and indicators must be included and normalized in the national and international research performance evaluation system. The social trends and factors were research social impact, the social development of society, increasing researchers' awareness of the research evaluation importance, lack of research culture in society, the gender gap in society, and human resources employment. The technological trends and driving forces were the development of information and communication technology, scientometrics indicators, and open science. The economic trends and driving forces included not emphasize on the oil economy merely, research grant, economic evaluation of research, and research budget. The environmental trends and driving forces were increased emphasis on green information, using the green environment components in research institutes, and a favorable organizational environment. Eventually, the political trends and driving factors included scienti c diplomacy, a country's domestic policy, war and political sanctions, research performance evaluation system, optimal research policy, and increased research collaboration. We suggest researching and study more deeply to de ne and normalize the new indicators for each social, technological, economic, environmental, and political dimension in the national and international research performance evaluation system.

Declarations
Ethics approval and consent to participate  The selecting documents process for the scoping review