Many of you will be familiar with the European Science Foundation Initiative and many of you will be aware of the anger and concern it is causing.  For further details, please view http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/about/knowledge_evaluation.asp and click on 'History'. For this reason the Director of the Institute of Historical Research, the Presidents of the Royal Historical Society and the Historical Association, and the Co-Convenors of History HE (UK) have written the following letter to the Chief Executive of the AHRC.

Professor Philip Esler

Chief Executive

AHRC

Whitefriars

Lewins Mead

Bristol

BS1 2AE

5 December 2007

Dear Professor Esler

We are writing to you on behalf of the four main organisations with UK national responsibilities for History to request that the AHRC disavow immediately and publicly as inadequate the attempt to produce a ranking of History periodicals which has recently been published by the European Science Foundation as part of the European Reference Index for the Humanities.

We have consulted widely with colleagues and can report that there is very little support for the proposed ranking. It is indeed seen by the vast majority as positively harmful to the discipline. 

We are fully aware that metrics is set to play a part in the assessment of Humanities research which it has not played up to this point. We also know that several organisations are currently engaged in the production of possible schemes. In our view this activity makes the abandonment of the crude and oversimplified ERIH criteria all the more urgent and crucial. It is vital that whatever scheme is eventually adopted commands confidence across the Humanities disciplines. For the AHRC to disavow now the manifestly flawed ERIH rankings would, we are certain, be a positive contribution to the development of serious schemes of assessment.

The arguments against the ERIH scheme of rankings will be so well known to you by now that it is almost unnecessary to repeat them again. We will do so again briefly for the sake of completeness, but, for all of us, and for all of those to whom we have talked, the fundamental point is that no attempt to deny that these rankings will be used as part of assessment has proved convincing. They are simply an unnecessary and unwanted diversion from the serious work in which the AHRC and other bodies are engaged.

The main points are as follows:-

Excellence in History simply cannot be defined in this way. The main point is that journals ranked in Category C are frequently ones of central importance nationally and internationally in their fields. Research of the very highest quality is always likely to appear across the range of scholarly journals.

The ERIH criteria are very inadequate as measures of quality. Some of the phrases within them relate to distribution and circulation rather than quality. Yet there is sufficient reference to quality to make the deduction that a Category A journal is superior to a Category C one which the uninformed will readily make.

The categories actually contradict ERIH's self-proclaimed aims, since they are so likely to undermine the status of journals which are regarded as the very best in their fields that both 'the visibility' of humanities research in Europe and the dissemination of European research in the humanities worldwide may well be reduced.

The categories are so imprecise and crude that any attempt to use them to assess, for example, research quality, career progression and funding-distribution will be profoundly flawed and totally indefensible. The AHRC and all involved in defending and improving the quality of research in the Humanities must recognise this now and immediately withdraw support for them.

Denials that the categories will not be used to inform decisions about research quality etc. no longer carry conviction. The AHRC should now make public its disavowal of a proposal produced rapidly by a small and unrepresentative committee.

Yours sincerely

Professor David Bates, Director, Institute of Historical Research

Professor Martin Daunton, President, Royal Historical Society

 Professor Barry Coward, President, Historical Association 

Professor Anne Curry, Co-convenor, History HE (UK)

Dr Virginia Davis, Co-convenor, History (HE) UK