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Published online 29 December 2008 |
457,
13
(2009)
| doi:10.1038/457013a
Corrected online: 14 January 2009
News
Good grades, but who gets the cash?
Britain's Research Assessment Exercise finds excellence more widespread than a focus on elite institutions would suggest.
British universities are bubbling with speculation about how the annual £1.5 billion (US$2.
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The graph you present here is an indicator of size of the department examined and as well as quality. This volume indicator bias was the very thing the RAE was designed to avoid. The graphical rating you show is thus hugely biased by departmental size, and is not a true indicator of the overall quality profile. A graph indicating % of activity in the 3* and 4* areas would be informative also. However, it might not please the big boys!
Research is not done by universities but by individual researchers within a university. So it seems absurd to allocate funding to universities, and not to individuals within the university. That would solve the "volume bias" problem. Regarding citation data, it would be nice to adopt a "weighted citation" approach, akin to the PageRank system used by the Google search engine to rank the importance of a web page. Essentially, this is a weighting scheme whereby the weight of a citing paper is increased if that paper is itself highly cited. That way a paper published in a high impact factor journal, such as Nature, and one published in a lesser journal would both stand the same initial chance of being properly valued.
Ranking institutions by the total amount of 4* and 3* research (effectively by volume) is nonsensical. For example, in your article Cambridge is placed at the top of the biological sciences table on this basis. However, a table similarly totaling amounts of lowest quality research in the biological sciences (2*, 1* and U) would also show Cambridge at the top of this less desirable league - accompanied by a similar order of institutions to those shown in your table. Clearly overall quality forms a far better indicator than quantity.