A review commissioned by the UK’s main research funders has cautioned against moving to a fully metricised system for the next Research Excellence Framework (REF) but says additional “value-led indicators” on culture and people should be included in future assessments.
Recommending that funders should “avoid an all-metric approach” to the next REF, the review suggests it is “unlikely” that a bibliometric-led evaluation of the sector’s research outputs “will deliver what the research community, government and stakeholders need from the exercise”.
Dispensing with peer review – on which the national audit of UK research held every seven years has largely relied since its inception in the 1980s – would be particularly unwise for the assessment of research impact because the “available indicators or infrastructure cannot approximate the richness of the current case study format”, concludes the review, which was designed to provide a “short, sharp, evidenced-informed look” at the current and potential uses of metrics in research assessment.
