The Research Excellence Framework (REF): A major impediment to free and informed debate?

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Keywords: UK research assessment exercise, Bibliometrics, Research funding, User and career involvement, Knowledge translation

For the past several months, if not years, academic departments of nursing throughout the UK have been beavering away to ensure that their submission to the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise was ready for return at the end of 2007. Most are now probably breathing a sigh of relief that the immediate task in hand has been completed, whilst simultaneously holding their breath as they anxiously await the results.

In the meantime, however, the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) have released a consultation document proposing fundamental and far reaching reforms to future arrangements for judging the quality of research in higher education, and allocating subsequent funding (HEFCE, 2007). In contrast to the existing system, which is based largely on expert peer review, the proposals indicate that in the future judgements will be made almost exclusively on a ‘new bibliometric indicator of research quality’.

A twin approach is proposed, with science-based disciplines being evaluated entirely by such quantitative measures, whilst other disciplines will be subject to a ‘light touch’ peer review. Nursing has been deemed a science-based subject. This in itself is likely to have potentially serious consequences, as the vast majority of nurse researchers do not publish in traditional ‘scientific’ journals and would probably see themselves as primarily social scientists, for whom the light touch peer review would be more appropriate. Concerns have already been raised about the classification of nursing in this way and no doubt strenuous representations to HEFCE will be made to try and reclassify nursing as a social science. We would add our voice to these calls. However, our concern here extends well beyond disciplinary issues, as important as these might be, and addresses more fundamental freedoms.

The last 20 years has seen an increasingly well informed and widespread debate, both within applied academic disciplines, and health and social care more generally, about the nature of research, its role in the generation of ‘evidence’, and the ways in which multiple forms of evidence can inform and improve the delivery of high quality care. A ‘new language’ of social policy has emerged based on ideas of empowerment, participation and partnership (Bernard and Phillips, 2000) and this has impacted on the way in which research relationships are enacted. No longer is the researcher accepted as the ‘de facto’ expert, and more emancipatory approaches have emerged, with user participation in health and social care research having flourished (see, for example, Nolan et al., 2007). Indeed one cannot now apply for a major grant from programmes such as the Service Delivery and Organisation (SDO) without explicit engagement with users. Such developments are to be welcomed and have not been confined to research, with initiatives such as the ‘Expert Patient Programme’ receiving endorsement at the highest level (Donaldson, 2003). Moreover, infrastructures such as INVOLVE (Hanley et al., 2004) have been created to promote and disseminate good practice in engaging users. Consequently, as Clough (2005) argues, users and carers should now be ‘active shapers of knowledge and subsequent action’.

Yet paradoxically the arguments that HEFCE advance for the use of quantitative metrics, other than to reduce the administrative burden, are based on the principle that ‘the research outputs in any discipline that are most highly cited by ‘other researchers’ will generally be those which have the greatest intellectual influence’ (HEFCE, 2007, our emphasis). This stands in marked contrast to the above developments in health and social care.

Furthermore, the potential impact of the use of citation measures to judge the quality of research outputs on the publication habits of researchers is significant and will result in the privileging of certain ‘peer reviewed’ journals to the neglect of the more diverse means of dissemination that are now widely promoted within health and social care. More fundamentally such a shift essentially excludes all but academics (and only certain academics at that) from engaging in genuinely informed debate on issues that are of greater importance than ‘intellectual’ pursuits.

To compound the situation further, HEFCE (2007) state that the new framework should ‘fully reflect’ national policy aims whilst also promoting research that ‘benefits the economy and society’. This at a time when the Department of Health is promoting a £50 million initiative to establish new ‘academic health centres’ to ensure that better partnerships are formed between universities and all NHS organisations, so that patient outcomes can be improved by the ‘conduct and application of applied health research’. The overall goal is to develop innovative models of conducting and translating applied health research into practice and to widely disseminate the results, so that creative links are forged between those who conduct research and those who use it.

The continued failure to ‘translate’ research into practice was highlighted by the Cooksey (2006) review of funding for health research in the UK, and the proposed formation of ‘academic health centres’ is one result intended to improve the ‘translation’ process. As a recent extensive review on knowledge translation concluded ‘knowledge translation is an interactive process underpinned by effective exchange between researchers who create new knowledge and those who use it… bringing users and creators of knowledge together during all stages of the research cycle are fundamental to successful knowledge transfer’ (Sudsawad, 2007).

The REF seems designed to have exactly the opposite effect. We would wish to distance ourselves from such a position and would urge that nursing, and indeed all cognate disciplines, do likewise.

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