Future UK RAEs to be Metrics-Based

[Loet Leydesdorff]

> But that would be foolish, and throwing out the baby with the
> bathwater. The dual funding system should be retained. The
> sensible way to use metrics is to have a rich, diverse,
> multiple-regression equation of weighted assessment metrics,
> and to adjust the weights of each according to field and
> further analysis and experience. For this there are many
> other candidate metrics over and above prior grant funding,
> such as citation counts, download counts, co-citation counts,
> hub/authority counts, semantic-web measures, endogamy/exogamy
> indices and many, many other rich, new harvestable metrics
> that will be spawned by the Open Access digital database of
> all UK research output (and many countable metrics, such as
> doctoral student counts, patents, invited keynotes, can be
> listed in and harvested from a standardised RAE CV linked to
> each researcher's OA Institutional Repository):

Yes, we may have the data, but we don't have the "rich, diverse,
multiple-regression equation of weighted assesment metrics" and "the weights
adjusted according to field and further analysis and experience."

I agree that a number of parameters have to be field-specific, but this does
not make the job easier.

With best wishes,


Loet
________________________________

Loet Leydesdorff
Amsterdam School of Communications Research (ASCoR)
Kloveniersburgwal 48, 1012 CX Amsterdam
Tel.: +31-20- 525 6598; fax: +31-20- 525 3681
loet at leydesdorff.net ; http://www.leydesdorff.net/