Measuring research quality: the United Kingdom Government's Research Assessment Exercise

Can research quality be measured meaningfully? Whether it can or not does not interfere with the desire to do so if the motivation is strong enough. This paper discusses the United Kingdom (U.K.) Government's approach to measuring research quality in U.K. universities, known in the U.K. as the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). The RAE is held at irregular intervals of time, the latest being held in 2008 (RAE 2008). The motivation is accountability of government spending, but in fact many different objectives are ascribed to the exercise. RAE 2008 is fully described so that it can be used to raise debating issues around the general issue of research quality, a subject that appears to be of universal interest in Information Systems. One major conclusion appears to be that journal rankings are not a good indicator of the quality of any paper published in that journal, nor necessarily of the combined quality of all the papers.