Quelle surprise: academics gaming the system sank the ERA journal rankings - 0 views
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Joyce Seitzinger on 31 May 11So here is the problem: research quality is a nebulous concept and it takes many years to work out whether someone's output has actually high quality or not. This is especially hard for non-insiders. The Government is a non-insider that funds academic research in Australia and so would like to know what it is getting for that money. So here is a typical solution: use the quality of research publications as a proxy for likely high quality in the future and use that to measure performance. Academics will recognise that solution as it is precisely what they try to employ internally.