ABSTRACTS BOOK OF THE 4 th WORLD CONFERENCE ON QUALITATIVE RESEARCH 107 Research Evaluation: an Exploratory Study of its Intellectual Structure Isabel Pinho 1 , Cláudia Pinhp 1 , Maria João Rosa 1 1 Universidade de Aveiro – Portugal – isabelpinho@ua.pt; claudiapinho@ua.pt; m.joao@ua.pt 1 Abstract Carol Weiss defines evaluation as “the systematic assessment of the operation and/or the outcomes of a program or policy, compared to a set of explicit or implicit standards, as a means of contributing to the improvement of the program or policy” (Weiss, 1998, p. 4). In the context of science evaluation is a natural issue as a mechanism of certification and control of research quality. As such, research evaluation has also been object of intense study because of the need of improving the quality of research performance and societal and innovation science impact (Donovan, 2011; Lee & Bozeman, 2005; Mingers & Leydesdorff, 2015). Research evaluation is an umbrella concept that crosses diverse micro, meso and macro scales for many purposes and is performed with different approaches. (Aksnes et al., 2017). This complexity can lead to a fragmented use of the concept or even its misuse, which is a problem that calls for a clear mapping territory concept (Leydesdorff & Persson, 2010). In this paper we depart from the general research question “What is Research Evaluation?” and we try to answer it by deploying it in three more specific questions: a) What are the seminal, core, relevant and review documents dealing with the research evaluation topic? b) What are the structural properties of scientific publications? c) What is the intellectual latent structure that drives Research Evaluation? The aim of this paper is then to map the intellectual and cognitive structure of the Research Evaluation topic. To this end, we searched the Web of Science (WoS) database for the period 2006– 2016, retrieving a total of 1483 publications. The choice of this time is valid, since it provides not only the scientific production carried out in these 10 years but will also add the cited publications, thus giving the historical perspective as well as the seminal papers in this issue Through direct author citation of these works, we were able to identify their origins and the seminal papers, and through word co-occurrence extracted from the titles and abstracts, the main lines of research were identified.