Harzing STI Leiden 2018.pdf (739.51 kB)
Running the REF on a rainy Sunday Afternoon: The relative merits of peer review vs metrics in national research evaluations
Presentation given at the Science and Technology Indicators conference in Leiden 2018. Entitled "Running the REF on a rainy Sunday afternoon: Can
we exchange peer review for metrics?" it makes the case that we should
let metrics do the "heavy lifting" in the UK REF [Research Excellence
Framework]. I show that a university-level ranking based on metrics
(Microsoft Academic citations for all papers published with the
university's affiliation between 2008-2013) correlates at 0.97 with the
The REF power rating taken from Research Fortnight’s calculation.
Using metrics to distribute research-related funding would free up a
staggering amount of time and money and would allow us to come up with
more creative and meaningful ways to build in a research quality
component in the REF.
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