The publication game: acceptable and not-acceptable in the British REF exercise

Every five years, universities in the UK submit themselves to an exercise that produces league tables to determine the levels of funding support provided for research infrastructure by government, based on the previous five years of research activity. In 2013, the next exercise, called the Research Exercise Framework, will see in each university, for each eligible staff member, up to four pieces of research output ‘briefly defined as a process of investigation leading to new insights, effectively shared’ submitted and reviewed by a national panel established for each of 36 specialist discipline areas. Judgement of the quality of the research work being done by each university, and the subsequent government funds that flow from this process, is based on the decisions made by these discipline groups. This article looks at the issues that are implicit in judgements made about quality research output in educational leadership and how such an exercise might restrict researchers in educational leadership to certain types of research activity.