The Research Excellence Framework and the ‘impact agenda’: are we creating a Frankenstein monster?
By Ben R. Martin. 2011
411 citations recorded by the source corpus.
In pursuit of public accountability, the mechanisms for assessing research performance have become more complicated and burdensome. In the United Kingdom, the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) evolved from an initially simple framework to something much more complex and onerous. As the RAE now gives way to the Research Excellence Framework (REF), ‘impact assessment’ is being added to the process. Impact comes in numerous forms, however, so its assessment is far from straightforward. While the Higher Education Funding Council for England is initially proposing a relatively simple methodology, the history of the RAE suggests that this approach will over time become ever more sophisticated. Yet if the ‘costs’ of an elaborate system for assessing ‘research excellence’ and its impact then exceed the benefits, the time may have come to re-examine whether a dual-support system still represents the optimum way of funding university research. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.
Subfields: Education, Emergency Medical Services, Management Science and Operations Research
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5017007a40485755f53e6d434d1d521292b27e5a
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Citations in the corpus
- From productive interactions to impact pathways: Understanding the key dimensions in developing SSH research societal impact (2019, methodology): “And this might emerge, following Martin (2011), through elongated pathways lacking one-to-one-correspondence between a research activity and a societal outcome, making it hard to see whether these productive interactions are significant and antecedent to impact or mere activity.”
- Knowledge exchange: a comparison of policies, strategies, and funding incentives in English and Scottish higher education (2013, methodology): “Benefits as well as cost of these initiatives need to be investigated and documented for future policy (Martin 2011)—rigorous evidence is required to investigate the ‘effectiveness’ of the ‘policy effectiveness’ models.”
- What is societal impact of research and how can it be assessed? a literature survey (2013, methodology): “Since the 1990s, there has been a visible trend away from automatic trust in the validity of this assumption; the expectation is that evidence shall be provided to demonstrate the value of science for society (Martin, 2011).”