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
Politics Rudd, religion, and the body politic in Australia 25 Nov 200718 Sep 2017 As I watched the total collapse of the conservatives in the federal election, and the landslide of Labor wins, I mused… Read More
Politics Student database to attract hackers 17 Jun 2008 Okay, so while we’re bagging on Queensland, here’s a couple of articles (Ars Technica, ZDNet) on a proposed and apparently non-negotiable database of Queensland students, including their things like photos, career aspirations, off-campus activities, contact information, behavior records, attendance, and performance records. But don’t worry: the minister has declared that… Read More
Biology Species-related publications 8 Sep 20238 Sep 2023 What’s a personal blog for, if not to blow my own horn? Well, it can only be to blow the horns of those who I have collaborated with, of course. Two of my most recent publications are: The first is a chapter in the open Access book edited by Schwartz… 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.