The RAE, The RQF and Those Metrics Again. (December 14, 2007)

The matters of the format of the UK's Research Assessment Exercise to follow the one to be implemented beginning in 2008, and the newly installed Australian Government's reformatting of the shemozzle of the Research Quality Framework left by the Coalition, continue to reappear.

The Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, Kim Carr, is reported in The Australian as adhering to his mantra of a metric based incarnation of the RQF based on the coming RAE (which is yet to be gestated), yet now we have the UK's Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) warning that the new metrics-based approach for the RAE which will be underpinned by citation analysis, i.e. the number of research papers published and what impact they have on the field of research, or how often they are cited by others, is severely flawed because "citation analysis does not provide stable and valid analysis at lower levels of aggregation".

The report by HEPI claims the plans to analyse research in six broad subject groupings "may produce results that suffice for the purpose of distributing funds at institution level, but that is all: it will not provide some of the more detailed comparative and management information provided by the [current] RAE. [A] citation-based approach does not measure research quality [and] if citation analysis does not closely mirror the results of the 2008 RAE, then the role of the expert panels will need to be extended" - to provide peer review.

HEPI also believes the proposed evaluation period should be reduced as "eight to 10 years is far too long a retrospective period on which to base funding for the next five to 10 years".

How about if Rudd and Co decide how many of the 38 public institutions deemed universities should be supported as universities and then apportion adequate base funding for them. And since as universities they ought to be fountainheads of learning and research allow the research council's to fund properly those individuals who make the university what it ought to be -- and stop the counterproductive micromanagement our governments (on both sides of the parliament) are hell bent on pursuing.

There's nothing quite so effective as top-down incompetence to straight-jacket a nation's progress.