Reporting on panel looking at the UK’s Research Excellence Framework, Liz Morrish looks at whether the assessment tools created by government have extended their reach and left academics exposed.
A very strong overall REF performance signifies a large concentration of outstanding work. It is an unambiguous plus. All the same, precise league table positions in the REF, indicator by indicator, should be taken with a grain of salt.
Measuring impact was a key feature of the just-released Research Education Framework in the UK. But ‘impact’ isn’t as fair a measurement as we could hope.
Not all eyes will be glued to the release of the UK’s Research Excellence Framework on Thursday. Some of the people who built the REF are evaluating the current lessons to improve the next version.
The Conversation asked the man who developed Britain’s Research Excellence Framework back in 2008, Rama Thirunamachandran, vice-chancellor and principal at Canterbury Christ Church University, to talk through it. We repost that conversation here.
Discussions around the REF have tended to be negative, but what exactly is viewed poorly varies by interest group[. Two academics who conducted an analysis of the media’s covefage of the framework argue there is much that can be learned for future assessment exercises and it is ever-more important that we get it right when thinking about ‘impact’ in research and the pressures academics face.
There is a push to demonstrate the impact of the social sciences, especially as political and funding authorities start viewing them through an immediate-payoff prism. But showing impact doesn’t always come at no cost.
With the final consultation period now over, the open access policy for Britain’s next Research Excellence Framework has been released. Alma Swan looks at the rollout–which requires the deposit of articles into repositories–and finds this is pragmatic but good policymaking that should help shift the culture in British universities towards open access.
“We are, as a species, addicted to story,” says English professor Jonathan Gottschall in his book, The Storytelling Animal. “Even when the […] Tom Burns, whose combination of play — and plays – with teaching in higher education added a light, collaborative and engaging model […] The creation of the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) has led to a heated debate on the balance between peer review and evaluative metrics in research assessment regimes. Luciana Balboa, Elizabeth Gadd, Eva Mendez, Janne Pölönen, Karen Stroobants, Erzsebet Toth Cithra and the CoARA Steering Board address these arguments and state CoARA’s commitment to finding ways in which peer review and bibliometrics can be used together responsibly. “We are, as a species, addicted to story,” says English professor Jonathan Gottschall in his book, The Storytelling Animal. “Even when the […] The interactional skill of large language models enables them to carry out qualitative research interviews at speed and scale. Demonstrating the ability of these new techniques in a range of qualitative enquiries, Friedrich Geiecke and Xavier Jaravel, present a new open source platform to support this new form of qualitative research. Title of course: Space/Power/Species What prompted the idea for the course? A few years ago, I came across the architect Joyce Hwang’s […]
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