Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A funding council conducting mid-career researcher review every five years against a self-selected list of ten publications, rather than an annual citation-count refresh.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
An institution recalculating each researcher's h-index every quarter for an internal dashboard is running a re-evaluation cycle, but one CoARA signatories specifically commit to moving away from.
Editorial commentary
A re-evaluation cycle is the interval and criteria on which a researcher’s, unit’s, or output’s contribution is periodically reassessed — for tenure and promotion review, institutional research-assessment exercises, or funder track-record review. The concept matters in responsible-assessment reform because the frequency and metric-dependence of a re-evaluation cycle shapes researcher behaviour: short, metric-heavy cycles reward frequent, easily countable output over slower, higher-risk work.
The CoARA position
The CoARA Agreement’s ten commitments include moving away from target-setting based on publication counts and journal-level metrics, and toward evaluation criteria and processes that are transparent, robust, and account for variation in career stage and disciplinary norms. A re-evaluation cycle built primarily around annual or biennial citation-count snapshots is exactly the pattern CoARA signatories commit to moving away from, in favour of longer, holistic review that better fits a lifetime-contribution lens.
A working example
The Research Council of Norway’s own funding-assessment guidance directs panels to a self-selected list of roughly ten relevant publications rather than a full output count or a recent-window citation snapshot — an explicit design choice to reduce the pressure a short re-evaluation cycle otherwise creates to publish frequently rather than well.
Where this connects
See CoARA and the CoARA Agreement for the commitment framework this sits under, and quantitative-qualitative balance for how metrics and expert judgement are meant to combine within a re-evaluation cycle rather than one substituting for the other.
References
- CoARA Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment, coara.org. Research Council of Norway, DORA policy statement, forskningsradet.no.
Also known as
Assessment review cycle · Indicator audit cycle
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
<role vocab="credit"
vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
vocab-term="Re-evaluation cycle"
vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/re-evaluation-cycle" />{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "DefinedTerm",
"@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/re-evaluation-cycle",
"name": "Re-evaluation cycle",
"identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/re-evaluation-cycle",
"description": "The interval and criteria on which a researcher's, unit's, or output's contribution is periodically reassessed for tenure, promotion, or funder track-record review.",
"inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/responsible-assessment#set",
"url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/re-evaluation-cycle",
"alternateName": [
"Assessment review cycle",
"Indicator audit cycle"
],
"license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
"publisher": {
"@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
},
"author": {
"@id": "https://casrai.org/#editorial-team"
},
"datePublished": "2026-05-21T02:22:55",
"dateModified": "2026-09-05T14:25:59",
"inLanguage": "en-GB",
"isAccessibleForFree": true
}
