A Study On Performance Evaluation Of Research Projects By Government-funding In The Universities In Hubei Province

Recently, the government has increased the financial aid to research projects in colleges and universities. The establishment of the research projects' performance evaluation systems is important to enhance the level of scientific researches. The research projects' performance evaluation plays an important role in the assistant management of scientific researches in a university or college.The research projects of colleges and universities are various. Most of the government-funding projects in universities and colleges are natural science subjects. In this dissertation, the performance evaluation of government-funding projects is researched, using performance evaluation theory, complexity theory, management science and the methods of empirical analysis. The main contents are listed as follows:The indexes for the performance evaluation of research projects are constructed based on the beginning, implementation, and ending of research projects, as well as the theories of index system of the performance evaluation and the research projects, from the manager's viewpoint, who works in technology management department of colleges and universities. In this research, all colleges and universities are investigated in Hubei province and several universities are chosen to obtain the research data. Then, the indexes are designed for the performance evaluation of the universities' research projects.The data process methods and the methods to calculate the weights of indexes are proposed to analyze the importance of indexes. The weights of indexes are evaluated on the research data by the expert evaluation method, the variation coefficient method, the entropy weight method and the multiple correlation coefficients, respectively. Each index has four kinds of indexes by above four methods. The synthesis weights are obtained by integrating these four weights of each index. Each weight of an index represents the importance of the index. It is found that the weights of technological basis index and the science and technology output index are higher than that of science and technology input index. It suggests that the level of performance evaluation of colleges and universities' research projects depends on the strength of the colleges and universities' technological basis and the quality of the colleges and universities' technology output. Finally, the performance evaluation index system of the colleges and universities' research projects in Hubei province is obtained.The method to measure the correlation between indexes is proposed to find out the complex relationships among indexes, and the method is applied to the research data in Hubei province. It is found that several technological basis indexes are closely related with several technological output indexes. The relationships are analyzed among the performance evaluation indexes, and it provides reference to manage the research projects for the managers in technology management department of colleges and universities.The research proposes the performance evaluation system of the colleges and universities' research projects. The performance evaluation system contain the scientific and technological strength model, the orientation analysis model of the technological input, the technological input efficiency model and the performance evaluation model of the research projects. The above models are applied to the colleges and universities in Hubei province. The universities are sorted by their scientific and technology strength in descending order:985 project universities, the 211 project universities which are non 985 project universities, and the normal universities. The governments increase the level of the technological inputs to universities, especially for 211 project universities and 985 project universities year by year. The science and technology input and the scientific and technological output are stable in 211 and 985 project universities. The comprehensive performance of universities is increasing year by year. Wuhan University of Science and Technology and Wuhan University of Technology both gain better comprehensive performance than others.Finally, an empirical analysis is made on the research data of the colleges and universities' research projects. Besides, several suggested countermeasures for the colleges and universities in Hubei province are introduced.