Hours spent preparing my RAE submission: many painful ones
Hours spent wondering what the REF will be like: even more!
Coming near to the end of my first academic year in my new job my thoughts are naturally turning to research. It is the first summer since I got my PhD where I don’t have to take a non-academic job just to pay the bills and so I can get on with my research for a sustained amount of time. The way my research is audited will completely change from now on, and no one seems to really know what the new system will entail!
The REF as it’s known, the research excellence framework, is being created by HEFCE (sorry, too many acronyms in this post: HEFCE is the Higher Education Funding Council for England for those of you that didn’t know) as a replacement for the controversial RAE (research assessment exercise) which previously rated an academic’s and department’s output. Here is what HEFCE has to say about the progress of the REF; as you will see, consultation is still under way.
One thing that is new is the proposed and hotly debated use of bibliometrics to judge a researcher’s contribution to the field. This method basically counts the number of times your work has been cited by someone else. Some scholars will come out of this very well, whereas others will be penalised. Part of the problem is that some fields especially social sciences and humanities move slower than others. It may take 5-7 years for your book or article to get under everyone’s radar and hence a bibliometrics exercise in 2010 will see works being cited that were written before 2005: hardly an assessment of someone’s recent output.
Bibliometrics can also be skewed: some academics in the US where bibliometrics is used as a tool to determine suitability for promotion among other things, have formed citation clubs where groups of scholars get together and deliberately cite each other’s work in their own! It seems that HEFCE have realised that this system could be a bit awkward, so the quantitative analysis will now sit alongside analysis by expert panels apparently, but this is all still up in the air. I will be trying to follow the debate as it progresses, so watch this space!
