Artificial intelligence is not yet ready to fully assess the quality of research outputs, but should be explored for use in certain parts of the Research Excellence Framework (REF) in future, according to a study.
Commissioned by the UK’s four higher education funding bodies, the paper said pilot testing should be used to determine whether AI predictions for scoring decisions could be used in smaller ways to complement the manual process.
As part of a wider Future Research Assessment Programme, the AI system designed at the University of Wolverhampton used machine learning to predict scores for journal articles by identifying patterns in those given by humans.
If successful, it was thought automation could help reduce costs on the “labour-intensive” REF process, which takes up a “substantial amount” of time of the over 1,000 experts who review outputs in subpanels over the course of a year.
