The University of Edinburgh is involved in a range of strategic partnerships, and noticed a lack of consistent, aligned evaluation practices. It proved a challenge to assess whether to enter into an agreement with a potential partner, or whether a strategic partnership indeed delivered its expectations, let alone to discuss this with their strategic partners. They invited five of their strategic partners to join hands to develop an evaluation framework, based on state-of-the-art literature leading to clear assessments of strategic partnerships. Leiden University’s CWTS and the University of Edinburgh's Science, Technology and Innovation Studies (STIS) were asked to contribute to the project given expertise in research governance and assessment, including collaboration and internationalization. We decided to co-create the framework with the international officers, which resulted in an evaluation framework. This looks unlike anything imagined, but it is changing the way in which evaluation thinking is integrated in practice.

How do researchers choose their field sites? In the case of seabird research, this question is all the more complex, because the birds themselves choose remote sites for which access and living conditions are strongly limited for the researchers. In this paper, I describe the use of a mixed methodology within my doctoral research to identify what access to the field site really means for researchers and how sites are connected together. This research contributes to the geography of science, examining the spatial dynamics behind scientific research. Here, I identify that some sites are more attractive for seabird researchers, and discuss why. While some sites are attractive to many research teams, they can also be a personal space for one researcher and thus the network between sites is a network of collaborations between single or teams of researchers.