Playing and Being Played by the Research Impact Game

Abstract

and Keele in the United Kingdom, came equal top in a league table, each with grade point averages of 3.80 (where 4 is a maximum). The Department of Philosophy at Oxford University was ranked tenth with a grade point average (GPA) of 3.40. Ranking systems are widespread, not least in the field of education (see Kehm, this volume, chapter 6). For example, Espeland and Sauder (2007) examine the rankings of US law schools and their effects on the behavior of key organizational participants, such as deans, who are compelled to pay attention to them despite being doubtful of their worth. Furthermore, while small differences in GPA calculations can amplify differences in rank ordering, these crude snapshots of relative performance provide easy and popular comparability for nonspecialist publics. However, there is something particularly distinctive about the ranking of UK philosophy departments described above: it is based on an evaluation of the impact of their research. By impact in this context, one would ordinarily imagine journal citations and other demonstrable measures of quality within the field of academic philosophy. Such bibliometrics have attracted considerable attention from analysts (e.g., Gingras, 2016). Yet this would be wrong. Impact in this UK setting means the social and economic beneficial impact outside academia. In other words, the departments of philosophy at Birmingham, Keele, and elsewhere in the United Kingdom were graded and ranked in terms of the social and beneficial impact of their research. In fact, all subject areas in UK universities were evaluated for this kind of impact as part of a major evaluation of research quality, the Research Excellence Framework (REF2014 hereafter, which is the successor to the Research Assessment Exercises of previous decades). UK universities made 1,911 submissions across all subject areas from 52,061 staff who produced 191,150 research “outputs” 3 Playing and Being Played by the Research Impact Game