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 Revisiting Haneef 14 Oct 2007 So, the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions has admitted that Haneef, the Indian muslim doctor who was deported for being of “bad character” because he was related to someone who had peripheral involvement in the London and Glasgow bombings, was wrongly charged on the basis of bad evidence. Quelle suprise!… Read More
Evolution Culpability and the Catholic Church 12 Apr 2010 The facts are no longer open to interpretation: not only bishops and archbishops, but the then head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, AKA the Inquisition, knew and covered up rather than dealt with pedophiles in the priesthood, and enabled further abuse. Michael Ruse, long an accommodationist,… Read More
Censorship More developments on internet filtering: the religious connection 28 Oct 20084 Oct 2017 As I feared, the internet filtering issue has now been taken up by special interests. The conservative Christian political party Family First, run largely by the Hillsong evangelical denomination, has one senator, but the balance of power is so tight they wield disproportionate power, and as PM Kevin Rudd and… 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.