Abstract
Evaluating the effectiveness of research activities is one of the topical issues in the higher education system. Despite this, studies on the extensive assessment of research units' outputs at the university are rare. The main goals of this study are (1) the development of a comprehensive methodology for assessing the research performance of the units; (2) testing this methodology to compare the performance indicators of 37 research institutes and centers. Both quantitative and qualitative research methods were applied in this study. Research results can be beneficiary for government bodies, allowing them to make decisions about the allocation or reallocation of funding and top management in higher education for benchmarking and internal performance evaluation of research institutes and centers. This article contributes to the theoretical basis of research performance evaluation at HEIs and puts forward a step-by-step methodology.