Beyond the RAE 2008: bibliometrics, league tables and the REF
On April 30 2008, the Scientific business of Thomson Reuters held "Beyond the RAE 2008: Bibliometrics, League Tables and the REF". The timely event, hosted by King’s College London, UK, helped to inform universities about appropriate uses of citation data in research evaluation, and provided a forum to discuss and plan for future evaluative activities around the upcoming Research Excellence Framework (REF), the successor to the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE).
The conference, developed primarily for those preparing their institutions for the REF, featured speakers from the Higher Education Funding Council (HEFC), The Center for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS), Evidence, Ltd. and Thomson Reuters, with an external perspective provided by the Australian Research Evaluation and Policy Project. The speakers described best practices in citation analysis and discussed strategies to assist universities in the data collection and evaluation process. In addition, case studies from King’s College London, the University of Leicester, and the University of Southampton were presented to illustrate these institutions’ experiences in collecting and managing research output metadata.
"We were pleased to work with King's College London on this special event. This truly was a university-led event; King's College stepped forward to provide leadership in making this important event possible, and we were glad to help make it a success," said Jim Pringle, vice president of product development for the Scientific business at Thomson Reuters.
Conference attendees participated in a survey examining key concerns about research evaluation in the new REF. The respondents' top concern about research evaluation in the REF — identified by 28 percent of respondents — is "getting accurate and verifiable data." "Institutional infrastructure," "Knowing what is required," and "Time and workload" were also significant concerns, each being identified by 20 percent of respondents.
"The survey results tell us that these representatives from the U.K. research system have reservations about their access to accurate, verifiable data within the REF, and their participation in the Beyond the RAE conference is an important first step in addressing them," said Pringle.
Scientific is already enhancing our content to meet the emerging needs of the UK research community. We are exploring partnerships with institutions to define and develop integrated solutions and encourage best practices with citation data, expanding the availability of regional journals in Web of Science, promoting and populating Researcher ID.com, and looking into adopting an institutional identifier.
Beyond the RAE 2008 was a great success in bringing together key decision makers in the REF.
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