Most university departments will be in a state of frenzy correct now with the deadline for submitting to the Study Excellence Framework (REF) only days away. As the final Ts are crossed and Is dotted, the approaching deadline could come as a relief to those heads of departments and employees concerned in the submission process. But for many academics, the process to date has been quite grim.
David Leech, a professor in economics at the University of Warwick and expert on the variable outcomes of Uk voting principles, submitted 4 study papers to the REF, all of which were rejected for currently being “below the regular essential in terms of good quality”. Even though economics is recognised as a distinct discipline, Leech’s perform is interdisciplinary, spanning economics, political science and operations. Simply put, it isn’t going to fit into one subject region.
“The government’s policy is to encourage interdisciplinary investigation, REF itself says it makes allowances for interdisciplinary analysis, but universities do not appear to be carrying out it and regard it as a danger,” says Leech.
Right after creating a Information Protection Act request – which provides a far more comprehensive picture about an individual REF submission situation – he discovered his investigation hadn’t been flagged as interdisciplinary. The operate was just judged as economics. Three of the papers he submitted had been published in Public Choice, a highly rated interdisciplinary journal.
REF replaced the prior Research Assessment Physical exercise (RAE) as the system for assessing the good quality of research in United kingdom greater schooling institutions on the basis of 3 weighted elements: outputs (65% of score), impact (twenty%) and environment/sustainability (25%). Universities can make submissions in 36 units of assessment, or topic areas. Their investigation is then assessed by an expert sub-panel in every single of these regions. The REF will establish the analysis funding that every single university receives, which will be announced in December 2014.
“The REF framework suggests a straitjacket set of incentives that you must match into,” says Leech. Younger people are going to see disincentives to straying outside familiar boundaries,which will have a “remarkable result” on the high quality of United kingdom analysis, he believes.
The University University Union, for which Leech is Warwick joint president, claimed last month that interdisciplinary investigation at Warwick was getting frequently excluded from the REF submissions procedure. A spokesperson for the university denies this, responding: “If any individual has failed to observe that the university not only values interdisciplinary study, but has in reality truly developed its analysis technique about it, then they have not been being having to pay much focus.” The university also credits its interdisciplinary strategy for the significant increase in grant income it obtained for the final academic yr.
But Leech is not alone in worrying about the impact of the REF on interdisciplinary analysis. Paolo Palladino, a professor in history at Lancaster University and lively voice in the interdisciplinary local community of history and social scientific studies of science has also been excluded from the REF, and says the “culture of secrecy” all around the submission procedure is a genuine difficulty.
Palladino says: “Workers are tied even more tightly to departments at the very exact same time as those departments, acting on existing experience, are forced by exercises like REF to become synonymous with disciplines. I am now currently being asked effectively to abandon my interdisciplinary commitments for analysis that meets with the approval of REF.”
In response, a spokesperson for Lancaster University, says: “Individuals have been communicated with on a one particular-to-a single basis at division level regarding the standing of their outputs. Lancaster has a strong and longstanding commitment to interdisciplinary work and will submit it to the REF the place it is a regarded to be element of a body of function that is internationally exceptional in high quality.”
Palladino predicts a bleak future for interdisciplinary research, which he says will end up currently being conflated with cross-disciplinarity, so that any collaboration between academics in different disciplines is defined as delivering interdisciplinarity.
Semantics aside, there’s no denying this complex problem is only gaining traction. So how do senior management see interdisciplinary research? Kevin Schurer, pro vice-chancellor at the University of Leicester and a professor in history, says, “some interdisciplinary investigation may existing too significantly of a danger to be submitted, in that it is not robust sufficient in any single discipline to entice a grade which reflects the research underpinning it.”
Schurer himself is no stranger to the difficulties of receiving interdisciplinary investigation submitted: “In the last Research Assessment Workout, I had two such pieces crossing the sciences and humanities which, in spite of currently being in highly-rated science journals and currently being comparatively properly-cited, were not submitted simply because they may possibly not have been nicely-received by the historical past panel, due to relative tiny level of background content material, and were imagined as well risky to cross-refer to the biological sciences panel, as the analysis was not central to that unit either.”
These views fit with the reputation of larger training as a risk-averse sector. But the situation goes far beyond the university itself. Analysis councils, whilst favouring interdisciplinary study when it enables them to distribute shared funding, are even now subject to obviously defined boundaries in between disciplines. Some academics argue that this tends to make them component of the issue and leads to the generation of unequal funding streams.
And then there is the debate close to definitions of ‘quality’, which John Holmwood, professor of sociology at the University of Nottingham, sees as an “concern of disciplinary organisation and power”, 1 that displays the shifting policy setting for funding analysis.
Holmwood believes interdisciplinary investigation challenges disciplinary hierarchies through the creation of new types of critical understanding, such as gender research, postcolonial research, cultural studies, none of which are acknowledged in the impact agenda for REF.
For Holmwood, 1 of the major things that goes against interdisciplinary research is the way analysis is assessed in the REF by means of the building of tiny scale subject panels. He explains: “The issue is the place an individual has to be a judge of perform in an area where there is no representative of the region to temper any damaging judgement,” adding that “the size of REF topic panels make this most likely to be the situation”.
One more widespread fear is the influence this will have on study innovation and those early career researchers making an attempt to forge a occupation path in academia. With a drive to publish in substantial impact journals, Elizabeth Dzeng, a PhD student at the University of Cambridge, says there is a concern that researchers will not remain accurate to their personal understanding of high quality study and conform to a journal’s definition of good quality in the hope of getting published.
With a 2012 examine exhibiting that best ranking journals “span a significantly less diverse set of disciplines than reduce ranking journals”, this could disincentivise young researchers engaging in interdisciplinary analysis.
The sacrifice of academic freedom is a large price to shell out, not just for interdisciplinary researchers but academia at big. As for Dzeng, she has come to realize the path she requirements to take to get published, where the manuscripts she submits to medical jornals will want to be written by way of a much more “objectivist mindset”, rather than through the “interpretative framework” that she feels is much more proper for her venture.
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Research that doesn"t belong to single subject area is deemed "too risky"
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