Science policy through stimulating scholarly output. Reanalyzing the Australian case

There is a long standing debate about perverse effects of performance indicators. A main target is science policy using stimulation of output as instrument. The criticism is to a large extent based on a study of the Australian science policy in the early 1990s. Linda Butler studied the effects and argued that the effect was an growth of output, but also a decrease of average quality of the output. These results have been cited many times. In this paper we reanalyze this case and show that the analysis of Butler was wrong: the new Australian science policy did not only increase the output of the system, but also the quality went up. We discuss the implications. (Author)