Beyond the impact factor

doi:10.1136/bmj.b553

Published 13 February 2009, doi:10.1136/bmj.b553
Cite this as: BMJ 2009;338:b553

Feature

Academic Medicine

Beyond the impact factor

Geoff Watts, freelance journalist

¹ London

geoff@scileg.freeserve.co.uk

Details of how the new research excellence framework will assessUK research are expected later this year. Geoff Watts looksat the possibilities for fairer evaluation of applied medicalresearch

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

The RAE is dead; long live the REF.¹ We’re talking researchquality: what’s good and what’s not; what’sworth doing and what isn’t. But how is good quality tobe defined? And to what extent should that judgment take accountnot only of the intellectual excellence of a research programmebut also, in the case of medicine, its value to clinical practice?The question is a live one, and set to become livelier. Oneanswer may lie in a still embryonic form of appraisal: the "socialimpact" of research.

For the benefit of readers who don’t follow the vicissitudesof the research community, the more familiar of these threeletter abbreviations, RAE, stands for research assessment exercise:the process by which, until last year, the Higher EducationFunding Council of England surveyed the quality of researchcarried out in British universities. The REF, the research excellenceframework,² is its replacement. . . . [Full text of this article]

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