Running the REF on a rainy Sunday Afternoon: The relative merits of peer review vs metrics in national research evaluations

Presentation given at the Science and Technology Indicators conference in Leiden 2018. Entitled "Running the REF on a rainy Sunday afternoon: Can we exchange peer review for metrics?" it makes the case that we should let metrics do the "heavy lifting" in the UK REF [Research Excellence Framework]. I show that a university-level ranking based on metrics (Microsoft Academic citations for all papers published with the university's affiliation between 2008-2013) correlates at 0.97 with the The REF power rating taken from Research Fortnight’s calculation. Using metrics to distribute research-related funding would free up a staggering amount of time and money and would allow us to come up with more creative and meaningful ways to build in a research quality component in the REF.