Research assessment – still opera in theatres

Abstract

Research assessments, reviewed recently in this journal,1 are now the key to unlock funds for research, an unsettling development for medical schools2 and perhaps one which will encourage discrimination against personal and applied research. The impetus for this change was the rapid rise of regional economies around some universities which awarded research degrees, sparking the tenet repeated recently from Downing Street:3 ‘excellent research leads to economic growth’, a slogan which may be a hostage to fortune rather than a universal truth. Nevertheless, medical schools hoping to get government (HEFCE) funding to create knowledge will only do so after achieving research which excels according to bibliometric scores, probably not an easy task as none of the definitive discoveries of modern medicine listed by Levanue4 appeared between the covers of Nature. But despite criticism and the availability of other scoring methods the trend is to use a simple metric to arrange organizations with multiple qualities into international league tables, and there seems little prospect of medical schools escaping bibliometric evaluation. The outcome of this selective policy may be a split of education between research and non-research universities, and within the research universities failure to support departments unable or unwilling to score highly. Unless researchers outside the magic circle of publishers can remedy their situation there will be no way to adjust the present bias of English research away from physical and applied sciences, such as surgery, a discipline averse from iconoclasm and without high-impact journals, yet providing one-quarter of procedures in the UK while receiving a tiny fraction of research funding.5 Its research has been likened to comic opera, but its lack of support is no laughing matter.