Thank the fates! The RQF is dead 21 Dec 2007 The previous Australian government, in its ongoing quest to out-mediocre the rest of the world, had instituted a “research Quality Framework”, liberally taken from a failed exercise in Britain. Now, the new government has declared it dead. It will not be missed. Politics
Censorship Network censorship by Apple 27 Apr 2010 Everyone who knows me knows I am a Steve Jobs fanboi. I’ve been using Macs since January 1985, and yes, I have an iPhone and I will buy an iPad once I have the cash and they get to a few point upgrades (always a good idea with Apple). I… Read More
Accommodationism Accommodating Science overview 13 Mar 2014 I have done quite a lot of blogging under this heading lately so I thought it might be useful to get all the posts used in order: On beliefs Why do believers believe silly things? The function of denialism Why do believers believe THOSE silly things? The “developmental hypothesis” of… Read More
Evolution An unnecessary rebuttal 29 Oct 2009 A paper has been published formally rebutting the single most stupid idea ever published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA (PNAS(USA)). The story is in Scientific American but the gist is that Lyn Margulis, who sees the world in terms of endosymbiosis, having once correctly argued… Read More
Why do you think the RQF is bad, John? Under the current system, we are rewarded equally for each peer-reviewed publication; so a paper in the Nature or Science is worth the same as a paper in Rivista di Biologia. That’s crazy. Something like the RQF, which rewarded quality and not just quantity, seems much better. It provides incentive to get work right, and not just publishable. BTW, the rumor is that something RQF-like will come in in any case.
Three reasons: 1. It was arbitrary in the way it assigned ranks to journals. While a lot of it was based on responses from the disciplines, so far as I could see the universities themselves did a lot of filtering. 2. It relies on the badly flawed h-index. 3. It is massively work intensive. I’m not against some kind of qualitative ranking of work, and at the least a book ought to count as more than 3 papers’ worth of work, but this particular system was flawed as hell.
I’m not aware of it assigning rankings to journals *at all*. As I understood it, assessors were – in theory – ranking work based on its intrinsic merit. Of course, it is very likely that they would use journals as a proxy for quality, but so far as I am aware that was left up to the assessors. But I could be wrong (that would make three times). In philosophy, there is a pretty good consensus on journals – at least at the top – so if I am right we would get few perverse results.