There’s a lot of cross-sector debate about how we can assess something as nebulous as research culture.
In January, the REF 2029 Steering Group announced that it is entering an extensive period of engagement with the research community to develop a set of indicators for the newly proposed People, Culture and Environment (PCE) part of the assessment.
To help inform this conversation, we wanted to share what we have learned as we developed indicators for research culture at Newcastle University to track the impact of our five-year Research Culture Action Plan.
We wanted to ensure that how we measure research culture change across our own institution is done in a way that is meaningful, builds trust, and avoids unintended consequences for the research community. We didn’t want to create metrics by committee, but instead, in collaboration with the research community. We also wanted to take a balanced and pragmatic approach. After all, there’s no such thing as a bad metric, only an irresponsibly used metric. This message sits at the heart of our university’s statement on the responsible use of metrics, as well as in our development of a Research Culture Index (RCI) that would help us to track our institution’s collective progress at enhancing our research culture.
