Academic Productivity

Nick Cohen has a provocatively titled piece in today’s Observer, “No one wins in modern-day academia”, examining the shortcomings of the Research Assessment Exercise.

If you’re a UK academic, you’ll know all about the RAE which, as it says on the tin, is an exercise to assess the quality of a department’s research and consequently determine future levels of government funding. My experience with this so far has been quite limited. In my old department, we measured success through policy influence, not journal publications, and my current work is just starting to yield results. But even if you are an active participant in the RAE, the question still remains: is this really the best way to assess our overall effectiveness and success? Academic life is about more than just research: we are also teachers, administrators and professional community members.

So setting aside the official funding role of assessment for the moment, I’d like to ask an open question. How do you evaluate your own success as an academic? (And as a relevant corollary, how does this affect how you choose to spend your time?)

---

About the author: James started contributing to AP.com after taking a wrong turn on a typography website. His productivity tips have all been stress-tested at Imperial College London, where he's a researcher on urban energy systems.

---

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you sign up for our mailing list or subscribe to our RSS feed!

This entry was posted on Friday, June 13th, 2008 at 7:20 am and is filed under Evaluation, Funding. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.