Content area
Full Text
Funding council's 'pilot exercise' goes back on original REF proposals. Zoe Corbyn reports.
The Higher Education Funding Council for England has returned almost to square one in the detailed design of the new system to replace the research assessment exercise.
In November, Hefce set out details of how the research excellence framework would assess research quality in the sciences. Quality would be judged using metrics, such as the number of times academics' published work was cited by peers.
Under the plans, all published papers from selected academic staff would be included, but self-citations - where an academic has cited his or her own work - would be excluded. Hefce also said that "initially at least" the Thomson Scientific Web of Science (WoS) would be used as the primary...