Dr. Anne Gärtner receives Early Career Award of the Einstein Foundation

Psychologist Dr Anne Gärtner from the TUD Dresden University of Technology wants to develop new assessment criteria for research performance that focus on quality, transparency and reproducibility with her project "Responsible Research Assessment". She was honoured with the Einstein Foundation's Early Career Award for this dedicated project. The prize is endowed with a total of 100,000 euros. 

This year is the third time that the Einstein Foundation has granted the Einstein Foundation Award for Promoting Quality in Research to recognise scientists and institutions that have made a significant contribution to fundamentally advancing the quality and the robustness of research results. "The Einstein Foundation Award is the first of its kind in the world to recognize efforts to improve research quality. The award shines a spotlight on individuals and projects that exhibit outstanding dedication, but also the courage to view research practice in a more critical light,” explains Martin Rennert, Chairman of the Einstein Foundation’s Executive Board. "We want to recognize these efforts and harness them as a means to drive action in the public sphere. Ultimately, credible and transparent research bolsters confidence in scientific work as a whole – work which plays an increasingly important role in society and the political arena in terms of its ability to address key challenges.” The prize is awarded in three categories: to individuals, institutions and early career researchers. 

Out of over 160 applications for the Early Career Award, Dr Anne Gärtner from Dresden University of Technology was able to prevail in the competition with four other finalists with her project "Responsible Research Assessment". In the jury's statement, it said: "Anne Gärtner's 'Responsible Research Assessment' initiative tackles a key issue in the ongoing credibility crisis in science—prioritizing quantity over quality in criteria for funding, hiring, and promotion. The project aims to develop criteria that will acknowledge and incentivize rigorous research practices and has the potential to provide a model that can be used across multiple academic disciplines.” The criteria will be used in recruitment and promotion decisions, particularly for professorial appointments. They will then be tested and established in the behavioral, cognitive, and social sciences. The long-term goal is to make the new assessment criteria for transparency, reproducibility and research quality available in a freely accessible online tool for implementation in appointment procedures. 

Dr Anne Gärtner is a research associate at the Chair of Differential and Personality Psychology at Dresden University of Technology. Her research focuses on the area of emotion processing and emotion regulation. In addition, she is also involved in open science and the reproducibility of data in psychology and neuroscience. "I am involved in this area because we have the problem in various scientific fields that findings cannot be replicated and/or reproduced. I also had to suffer from this in my doctoral thesis. The "publish-or-perish" culture contributes greatly to this problem. The current incentivisation in research leads to publishing as much as possible as quickly as possible, at the expense of the quality of the research, e.g. samples that are too small, insufficient statistical power, false positive findings, and much more. The focus should once again be on quality rather than quantity, so that our research becomes more credible and reproducible. And this requires incentives, otherwise there will be no change," says Anne Gärtner, explaining the motivation behind her project. 

Receiving the Early Career Award from the Einstein Foundation is a great honour for the young scientist and, above all, recognition of her commitment over the past few years. 

The presentation of her project in the final of the Einstein Foundation Award is available online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHQbrK4VCXY&list=PLxPCLWtwUCx4oFi3AH88ocRqB5JRfAQhM&index=4