UK backs off using citations to judge research quality

Times Higher Education : The use of citations to determine the quality of academic work in the hard sciences is to be abandoned in favour of peer review in the new system being designed to replace the research assessment exercise.However, information about the number of citations a scholar’s work accrues could be provided to assessment panels to help “inform” their judgments in a range of subjects.At a conference on the forthcoming Research Excellence Framework (REF) this week, the Higher Education Funding Council for England sketched out how it intends to assess the quality of research outputs in the system, which will determine the allocation of $2.9 billion of annual research funding from 2014."We just don’t think bibliometrics are sufficiently mature at this stage to be used in a formulaic way or, indeed, to replace expert review,” said Graeme Rosenberg, Hefce’s REF project manager. “However, there is still scope for bibliometrics to inform the assessment process.”