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What a scientist said on the research assessment exercise

已有 4428 次阅读 2009-3-6 18:14 |个人分类:未分类|系统分类:观点评述

I had got the article for a long time, today I read it word for word because I want to cite it in an article. and feel panic if we scientometrician do research evaluation on this way. why research evaluation is rejected by scientist? why research evaluation can not be used to develop  science? it is high time that we took it serious

follow is what the result of research assessment from a scientist eyes

Universities will have to decide what sort of science they want, they can bend their policies to every whim of RAE(Research Assessment Exercise) they want; they can bow to the pressures for corporatization from the funding council.

Or they can have creative scientists who win the real honours.

They cannot have both.

If they want to have the latter they will have to have universities run by academics. And they will have to avoid corporate and commercial pressures to remove power from their best researchers by abolishing eminent departments and centralizing power at a higher level. We have seen what this approach has done to the NHS, but it is a characteristic of the corporatizing mentality to ignore or misuse data. They just know they are right.

 

It is also the box-ticking culture of managerialism that has resulted in approval of BSc degrees in anti-science (Colquhoun, 2007). Impressive sounding validation committees tick all the boxes, but fail to ask the one question that really matters: is what is being taught nonsense?

The policies described here will result in a generation of 'spiv' scientists,churning out 20 or even more papers a year, with very little originality. They will also, inevitably, lead to an increase in the sort of scientific malpractice that was recently pilloried viciously, but accurately, in the New York Times, and a further fall in the public's trust in science. That trust is already disastrously low, and one reason for that is, I suggest, pressures like those described here which lead scientists to publish when they have nothing to say.

I wrote recently (Colquhoun, 2007) ‘All of us who do research (rather than talk about it) know the disastrous effects that the Research Assessment Exercise has had on research in the United Kingdom: short-termism, intellectual shallowness, guest authorships and even dishonesty’. Now we can add to that list bullying, harassment and an incompetent box-ticking style of assessment that tends to be loved by HR departments.

This process might indeed increase your RAE score in the short term (though there is no evidence that it does even that). But, over a couple of decades, it will rid universities of potential Nobel prize winners.



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