Book Description

This report, prepared for and funded by the Joint Funding Bodies' Review of Research Assessment, presents findings from a series of nine facilitated workshops held with academics and research managers across the United Kingdom (UK) in December 2002. The objective of the workshops was to investigate views of research quality and attitudes towards different models of research assessment. The report outlines the recurring themes and issues raised by the 142 participants in the workshops. The participants, academics and research managers, represented over one third of the 173 institutions that submitted to the Research Assessment Exercise in 2001. This report will be of interest to those concerned with research assessment and evaluation in academic research, both practitioners and policy makers. In the first workshop task, participants considered the characteristics of high quality research and how it should be assessed. In the second task, participants discussed the strengths and weaknesses of four approaches to research assessment: Expert Review, Algorithms, Historical Ratings, and Self Assessment. In the remaining two tasks, participants were asked to design their ideal assessment system, basing it on one of the approaches examined in Task 2. They then considered how their system would be implemented, what its weak points might be, and how its use would change research culture in UK higher education. The overwhelming majority of the workshop participants felt that research should be assessed using a system based on peer review by subject-based panels. Of the 29 systems designed, 25 were based on Expert Review. The participants also indicated that these panels should be informed by metrics and self-assessment, with some input from research users. The first volume of this report describes the methodology and details the findings of the workshops. The second volume contains additional source data. (66 tables, 1 figure).