In 2015 Supreme Audit Office published the report concerned the quality of doctoral studies in Poland. Result of the conducted audit is alarming: “there are serious doubts both about quality and effectiveness of mass doctoral education” (SAO 2015). The text presents an overview of university regulations concerned the evaluation of annual achievements of PhD students (in the area of social sciences) and indicates its potentially negative consequences for the quality of their academic activity. The article refers to two terms – “running for points” and “parametric game”– introduced by Emanuel Kulczycki to describe consequences of economization of research evaluation system, i.e. measuring academic activities and turning them into points-based rewards.
The aim of this paper is twofold. Firstly, I present the scholarly book publications patterns of Polish scholars. Secondly, I show how scholarly book publications are assessed in various European research evaluation systems. Moreover, I argue that the diversity of evaluation models depends on the scientific policy aims in a given country. This presentation of European models allows me to discuss a new Polish science policy instrument, that is the list of publishers prepared for the upcoming evaluation exercise in 2021. In 2018, the Ministry of Science and Higher Education in Poland implemented a new model of scholarly book publication assessment based on the list of publishers. On the one hand, such a science policy instrument might be a way to appreciate the best quality scholarly books and give them more points than articles in the evaluation exercise. On the other hand, it is a so far unknown instrument which differentiates publications that have been treated the same up to date. Additionally, this paper aims to shed some light on how the new Polish model was prepared.