Editorial: Research assessment exercises are necessary — but we need to learn to do them better
The University of Sydney says that participating in each ERA exercise costs it 40,000 hours in staff time and Aus$2 million in salaries.Research evaluation at the Australian Research Council , one of the country’s main funding bodies, is set to get a makeover.
This is a rare case in which an evaluation system can be rewritten from scratch. The ARC should take this opportunity to improve how it measures and communicates the value of Australia’s research workforce, on the basis of not just lessons learnt from the ERA’s deficiencies, but also principles that have been developed and implemented elsewhere in the world. In doing so, it will help to create a research culture that reflects the best possible values that research should represent.
Between 2010 and 2018, there were four ERA exercises scoring outputs from Australia’s 42 universities and publicly funded research institutions. Research is given a rating from 1, for “well below world standard”, to 5, for “well above world standard”. For most science and engineering disciplines, citation metrics are the primary measure; for humanities, social sciences, computing and mathematics, the reliance is on peer review.
These efforts came without much discernible reward. The results of the ERA — unlike, say, the Research Excellence Framework in the United Kingdom — are not used to decide university funding. Instead, they are used for such purposes such as setting research strategy, benchmarking and evaluating trends. At the same time, pitting institutions against each other encourages them to poach academics and duplicate expertise, rather than fostering a collaborative, cross-disciplinary research culture.
The review wisely resists suggesting that the ERA be replaced with a purely metrics-based exercise to reduce overheads. Using metrics such as citations and journal impact factors is problematic, to say the least. For one thing, they do not capture replication studies and meta-analyses, which journals are increasingly publishing.
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