The Evolution of the UK’s Research Assessment Exercise: Publications, Performance and Perceptions

Bence, Valerie; Oppenheim, Charles

doi:10.1080/00220620500211189

Cited by 74 publications

(67 citation statements)

References 14 publications

(14 reference statements)

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“…In 1992 (as well as in the subsequent 1996, 2001, over 90 percent of the UFC's research funds were distributed by its successors, the Higher Education Funding Councils (HEFCs) for England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, according to the ratings of its subject panels; and the pre-1992 'old' universities had to compete for that money with the new universities (qua ex-polytechnics and other similar higher education institutions) (Williams, 1993;Kogan and Hanney, 2000;Tapper and Salter, 2003;Bence and Oppenheim, 2005;Martin and Whitley, 2010;Morris, 2010).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The UK Research Assessment Exercise and the narrowing of UK economics

Lee¹,

Pham²,

Gu³

2013

Cambridge Journal of Economics

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Federated learning (FL) has enabled distributed learning of a model across multiple clients in a privacy-preserving manner. One of the main challenges of FL is to accommodate clients with varying hardware capacities; clients have differing compute and memory requirements. To tackle this challenge, recent state-of-the-art approaches leverage the use of early exits. Nonetheless, these approaches fall short of mitigating the challenges of joint learning multiple exit classifiers, often relying on hand-picked heuristic solutions for knowledge distillation among classifiers and/or utilizing additional layers for weaker classifiers. In this work, instead of utilizing multiple classifiers, we propose a recurrent early exit approach named ReeFL that fuses features from different sub-models into a single shared classifier. Specifically, we use a transformer-based earlyexit module shared among sub-models to i) better exploit multi-layer feature representations for task-specific prediction and ii) modulate the feature representation of the backbone model for subsequent predictions. We additionally present a per-client self-distillation approach where the best sub-model is automatically selected as the teacher of the other sub-models at each client. Our experiments on standard image and speech classification benchmarks across various emerging federated fine-tuning baselines demonstrate ReeFL's effectiveness over previous works.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The UK Research Assessment Exercise and the narrowing of UK economics

Lee¹,

Pham²,

Gu³

2013

Cambridge Journal of Economics

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“…However, the evaluations continue to attract significant criticism (see, e.g., (Macdonald & Kam, 2007;Paul, 2008) and comments quoted by Bence and Oppenheim (Bence & Oppenheim, 2005)), even though it is unlikely that there would now be widespread support for Williams' view in 1998 that the RAE was "a dysfunctional juggernaut, lumbering on under its own momentum and threatening to crush research creativity, careers and scientific integrity" (Williams, 1998). As Velody (1999) notes "no better device than this objectified subjectivity has been elevated as a candidate for the function required in this terrain of research selectivity", and it is certainly the case that RAE-like procedures are becoming increasingly used elsewhere, as exemplified by Excellence in Research for Australia, Valutazione Triennale della Ricerca (in Italy), and the Performance-Based Research Fund (in New Zealand).…”

Section: Ref 2014 and Beyondmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Further discussions of the evolution of the evaluation procedures over the period are presented in several reviews (Barker, 2007;Bence & Oppenheim, 2005;Gilroy & McNamara, 2009;Martin & Whitley, 2010;Morgan, 2004).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This has resulted in a general acceptance that the limited resources available should be selectively channelled to those universities (and their constituent departments) that have previously demonstrated their ability to carry out high quality research. The United Kingdom (UK) has pioneered the development of systematic procedures for quality assessment in higher education (in teaching as well as research (Harvey, 2005;Harvey & Green, 1993;Salter & Tapper, 2000)), and the results of regular and detailed evaluations of research quality have now been used by the government for over a quarter of a century to inform the allocation of research funding (Bence & Oppenheim, 2005).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Assessment of Research Quality in UK Departments of Library and Information Management

Willett¹

2012

Library and Information Science Trends and Research: Europe

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Purpose Provides an historical overview of assessments of research quality conducted by the United Kingdom funding councils in the period 1986-2008, with special reference to the assessments that have been carried out of departments in the library and information management (LIM) sector. Methodology/approach A literature review covering both LIM-specific material and more general sources discussing the assessment of research quality in UK universities. Findings There is clear evidence of an increase in the general quality of the research carried out by the LIM sector over the review period. This has been accompanied by a decrease in the number of traditional LIM departments submitting themselves for assessment, with these being replaced in the assessment process largely by information systems departments. The rankings over the review period have been dominated by a small number of departments with long-established research traditions. Originality/value of the paper While there is an extensive literature describing research assessment in general, and a few articles describing individual assessments in the LIM sector, there is no overview of the involvement of the LIM departments over the whole series of assessment exercises that has been carried out.

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“…Assessing societal impact at a national scale: the experience of the research excellence framework 2014 Completed at the end of 2014, the REF builds on three decades of experience of national research assessment in the United Kingdom (Bence and Oppenheim, 2005). Prior to the REF, the various Research Assessment Exercises had followed the conventional pattern for ex post evaluation.…”

Section: History and Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessing (for) impact: future assessment of the societal impact of research

Hill¹

2016

Palgrave Commun

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National research assessments play a role in providing accountability-to funders, government and civil society-for the activities of largely autonomous research systems. Increasingly, an element of such assessments is the assessment of societal impact. In this article, I review the development of impact assessment, with a focus on the UK's Research Excellence Framework, and consider implications and challenges for the future. Notwithstanding these challenges, I further argue that the assessment of societal impact needs to become a more central aspect of research evaluation. This article is published as part of a collection on the future of research assessment.

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The Evolution of the UK’s Research Assessment Exercise: Publications, Performance and Perceptions

Cited by 74 publications

References 14 publications

The UK Research Assessment Exercise and the narrowing of UK economics

The UK Research Assessment Exercise and the narrowing of UK economics

The Assessment of Research Quality in UK Departments of Library and Information Management

Assessing (for) impact: future assessment of the societal impact of research

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