The UK’s main public research funders have commissioned a “short, sharp, evidence-informed look” at the current and potential uses of metrics in research management and assessment.
The announcement of the review comes a week after the publication the results of the 2021 Research Excellence Framework (REF), a sector-wide evaluation that relies heavily on peer review, and seven years after the last major look at the issue, 2015’s The Metric Tide, concluded that it was “not currently feasible to assess the quality of research outputs using quantitative indicators alone”.
The three-person panel for this review – dubbed “The Metric Tide Revisited”, includes two co-authors of the 2015 exercise: James Wilsdon, Digital Science professor of research policy at the University of Sheffield, and Stephen Curry, assistant provost for equality, diversity and inclusion at Imperial College London. They are joined by Elizabeth Gadd, acting head of research culture at the University of Glasgow and chair of the International Network of Research Management Societies’ research evaluation group.
