The Quality Profile
The quality profile is the result of a periodic evaluation and expresses the qualitative level of research, development, artistic, and other creative activities of the HEI or PRI, or its components, in the selected field of research. The 25 outputs of research, development, artistic, and other creative activities, which make up the application for evaluation, are divided into five qualitative categories, ranked from best to worst (in numerical terms), based on the evaluation by the relevant subpanel:
5 – ‘World-leading quality’;
4 – ‘Internationally excellent quality’;
3 – ‘Internationally recognized quality’;
2 – ‘Nationally recognized quality’;
1 – ‘Below the standard of nationally recognized work’.
The resulting quality profile for an institution or part of an institution that has submitted an application for assessment reflects the proportion of outputs marked with each of the five quality marks within a particular application. It is thus a percentage of the number of outputs classified as world-leading, internationally excellent, internationally recognized, nationally recognized, and unranked (below the standard of nationally recognized work) within the application submitted for periodic evaluation. The last quality category also includes so-called ‘zero’ outputs (which, based on the principles of representativeness and evenness, also reflect the lack of creative outputs of the institution/participating institution in a particular research area) as well as outputs that are neither scientific nor creative.
Example: An evaluation application containing 25 outputs was evaluated by the research subpanel. Two outputs were classified as world-leading quality, five outputs were classified as internationally excellent quality, twelve outputs were classified as internationally recognized quality, four outputs were classified as nationally recognized quality, and two outputs were rated below the national quality category and were therefore classified as unranked. The resulting quality profile for a given institution/workplace in a given scientific field is a rating (from world-leading quality category to unranked category) of 8 – 20 – 48 – 16 – 8 (in percentages).
The quality profile for this application can be presented in the following format:
| Evaluation | Number of outputs | Quality profile |
| World-leading quality | 2 | 8% |
| Internationally excellent quality | 5 | 20% |
| Internationally recognized quality | 12 | 48% |
| Nationally recognized quality | 4 | 16% |
| Below the standard of nationally recognized work | 2 | 8% |
The quality profile is an assessment of the research level of the workplace as a whole. The assessment of particular outputs is not published.