Hi,
I've been asked to forward this on to the list - a response to the recent
call for reaction to the RAE.
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au revoir
niall johnson
Email: [log in to unmask]
Department of Geography and Sidney Sussex College
University of Cambridge Cambridge
United Kingdom CB2 3EN United Kingdom CB2 3HU
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My current 'day job' is providing the admin support to a major London
medical school's preparations for the RAE. While it is not directly related
to geography, my experience in this Russell Group institution is certainly
that active researchers will be excluded from the School's RAE returns
because their research is not considered to be of a high enough standard or
even the 'right' type of research. It looks very likely that the School is
about to go through a redundancy exercise and whilst I have no hard evidence
that RAE performance will be a criteria in decideing who to go, I would be
very surprised if it was not - a number of staff have certainly been
encouraged to take early retirement or move to NHS contracts because their
research was not considered strong enough. Again, I don't know if these
criteria are being applied outside of the clinical disciplines, but (despite
the explicit assurances from HEFCE that bibliometric measures will not be
used in the RAE) my seniuor colleagues seem to be looking at journals'
impact factors when making their decisions as to who to include in the RAE -
hence where you publish seems to be far more important that what you
publish.
Whilst I find all of this disturbing and distasteful, it is the logic of the
RAE....
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