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
Academe Us, them and the real issue 21 Apr 2011 I think I need to clear the air a bit. In the Synthese posts I have been defending the authors of the special issue to which I contributed. Some may think this has to do with my agreeing with them. I happen to, in the main, but I do not… Read More
Biology Evopsychopathy 5: Conclusion 2 Jan 20133 Jan 2013 The criticisms of evolutionary psychology and its predecessors sociobiologies 1 through 3 focus on three major points: 1. It is adaptively-biased; 2. It is gene-centric (or biological determinist, which amounts to the same thing); 3. It is culturally biased in favour of the privileged classes of the people making the… Read More
Ethics and Moral Philosophy Who’s responsible? 11 Jun 200922 Jun 2018 Also, it seems that one only is motivated by religion if one is not Christian. By Dan Mathewson. 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.