A Heads of Chemistry UK (HCUK) meeting held in London in May marked the start of consultations between the UK’s four funding councils and interested parties on the draft criteria for assessing research in the research assessment exercise (RAE) set for 2008. Speaking at the meeting, Cambridge professor Jeremy Sanders, and recently appointed chair of the chemistry sub-panel for RAE 2008, said, ‘Place of publication and impact factors will not carry any quality implications in RAE 2008’. This approach represents a positive response from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), following a call by the House of Commons science and technology committee, in its July 2004 report Scientific publications: free for all?, for HEFCE to ‘remind RAE panels that they are obliged to assess the quality of the content of individual articles, not the reputation of the journal in which they are published’. 

The panels 

Sanders went on to outline the new two-tier structure that will underpin RAE 2008. There are 67 subject-specific sub-panels, one of which will judge chemistry submissions. The sub-panels are grouped like with like into one of 15 main panels. Chemistry along with sub-panels for physics and Earth systems and environmental sciences are grouped together in main panel E, chaired by Professor Dame Julia Higgins of Imperial College, London. The role of the main panel, which comprises the sub-panel chairs, international members and research council observers, is to oversee the assessment of cognate subjects. Through discussion and comparison, the panel will ensure that a coherent set of working methods, definitions and assessment criteria are used in the exercise, from which the draft outcomes will be produced. 

The subject-specific sub-panels will carry out the assessments of research submitted to the exercise and make recommendations to the main panels on the ‘quality profiles’ to award for each departmental submission. The sub-panel members and chairs were appointed from ca 5000 nominations by some 1400 bodies. Sanders pointed out that the chemistry sub-panel (see Table) is populated with experts with a variety of backgrounds, which will ensure all areas of the subject are covered. The four higher education funding councils have also ensured that ‘users’ of research are also represented on the individual sub-panels so that the exercise properly rewards applied and practice-based research.   

Although the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) welcomed a chemistry sub-panel in its response to HEFCE’s consultation on the panel configuration and recruitment for RAE 2008 last year, the make-up of the main panel remains a cause for concern for the Society. ‘The absence of biological sciences from main panel E may well cause problems since there is a large and increasing overlap between the two sub-groups [chemistry and biology] and it is difficult to see how this is dealt with under the proposed system’, the RSC states in its response.   

Members of the RAE 2008 chemistry sub-panel

Assessment and profiles 

Building on HEFCE’s announcement in February last year that the exercise would produce quality profiles for departments, rather than the individual scores of RAEs of old (see Educ. Chem., 2004, 41(3), 60), Sanders explained that each department will be assigned a distribution of scores across a five-point scale, ranging from unclassified to the top-rated four star. He explained this distribution will form the quality profile and will be based on the sum of three components:   

Outputs of individuals. For each individual member of staff submitted for assessment in the exercise, four research ‘outputs’ will be considered. As well as research publications, outputs will include patents, reports and software. According to Sanders, to be deemed four star quality research might be:

• leading or at the forefront of the research area; 
  
• unique in developing new thinking, new techniques or a novel result; 
  
• a major influence on a research theme or field; 
  
• developing new paradigms or new concepts for research; 
  
• encouraging major changes in policy or practice with respect to applied research.   

Where research is published will count for nothing. Instead departments will have the opportunity to highlight exceptional qualities of its staff’s research by using text boxes. ‘Here departments can expand on the context of research or special circumstances such as an individual’s role in multi-author or interdisciplinary work, or the context and importance of applied or other non-refereed work. This feature of the exercise will allow all staff to be assessed fairly’, said Sanders. 

The research environment.  Attributed to the institution, this includes the assessment of the physical infrastructure, research strategy, staffing policy and support systems in place for early-career staff, new entrants  etc, research expenditure, research students and studentships. As part of this component the sub-panel judges will also consider the esteem of a department measured by, for example, the number of senior overseas visitors to its staff. 

Esteem of individuals. Staffs’ esteem will be measured by, among other things, their plenary, invited and named international lectures, role in organising conferences, visiting appointments, election to fellowships of learned societies, prizes for research, editorships of journals and membership of editorial boards and industrial consultancy or involvement with spin-out companies. However, only four categories of esteem measure will be considered for each member of staff. Both the judging panels want all departments to submit all their staff for assessment in this component. To encourage this, the sub-panel judges will assess individuals’ esteem in the context of the career stage at which they are at. This consideration will, in Sanders’ view, justify the inclusion of members of staff at all career stages to this component of the exercise.

Commenting specifically on panel E, Sanders indicated that these three components will be weighted 60, 20 and 20 per cent respectively. The four funding councils will use the results of RAE 2008 to determine how billions of pounds of research funding is shared between UK institutions. 

The sub-panels will publish the draft subject-specific criteria for RAE 2008 later this month. An online consultation open to interested parties including individuals, departments, institutions, professional organisations etc will run on the RAE website from 16 July to 19 September. After the deadline both the main panels and sub-panels will meet to discuss the responses and revise the criteria before final publication in December. During the summer of 2006 HEIs will be supplied with RAE 2008-related software to facilitate their submissions. The census date is 31 October 2007 and the assessment phase will run from early to mid-2008 with the results published in December. James Berressem