Hobson’s choice: the effects of research evaluation on academics’ writing practices in England
| Date | 18 September 2017 |
| Pages | 503-515 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/AJIM-12-2016-0216 |
| Published date | 18 September 2017 |
| Author | Sharon Mcculloch |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Information behaviour & retrieval,Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information management |
Hobson’s choice: the effects of
research evaluation on academics’
writing practices in England
Sharon Mcculloch
Department of Linguistics and English Language,
Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK
Abstract
Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of research evaluation policies and their
interpretation on academics’writing practices in three different higher education institutions and across three
different disciplines. Specifically, the paper discusses how England’s national research excellence framework
(REF) and institutional responses to it shape the decisions academics make about their writing.
Design/methodology/approach –In total, 49 academics at three English universities were interviewed.
The academicswere from one Science, Technology, Engineeringand Mathematics discipline(mathematics), one
humanities discipline (history) and one applied discipline (marketing). Repeated semi-structured interviews
focussed on different aspects of academics’writing practices. Heads of departments and administrativestaff
were also interviewed. Data were coded usingthe qualitative data analysis software, ATLAS.ti.
Findings –Academics’ability to succeed in their career was closely tied to their ability to meet quantitative
and qualitative targets driven by research evaluation systems, but these were predicated on an unrealistic
understanding of knowledge creation. Research evaluation systems limited the epistemic choices available to
academics, partly because they pushed academics’writing towards genres and publication venues that
conflicted with disciplinary traditions and partly because they were evenly distributed across institutions and
age groups.
Originality/value –This work fills a gap in the literature by offering empirical and qualitative findings on
the effects of research evaluation systems in context. It is also one of the only papers to focus on the ways in
which individuals’academic writing practices in particular are shaped by such systems.
Keywords Higher education, Qualitative research, Research evaluation, Epistemology, REF,
Academic writing, Knowledge creation
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Almost every aspect of an academic’s work is mediated by writing, both in terms of the
day-to-day tasks that consume their time and in terms of their scholarship over the course of
a career. This writing and the practices around it are changing as the demands of academic
life have changed. Transformations in higher education, including the introduction of a
more managerialist approach, have altered the nature of the writing demands faced by
academics (Clarke and Newman, 1997; Deem et al., 2007). One of the most significant of these
demands on academics’writing practices relates to systems for evaluating research quality,
which, in the UK, where the current study is located, takes the form of the national research
excellence framework (REF). This national exercise in assessing research quality is
Aslib Journal of Information
Management
Vol. 69 No. 5, 2017
pp. 503-515
Emerald Publishing Limited
2050-3806
DOI 10.1108/AJIM-12-2016-0216
Received 28 December 2016
Revised 17 April 2017
17 May 2017
4 June 2017
Accepted 19 June 2017
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/2050-3806.htm
© Sharon McCulloch. Published by Emerald Publishing Limited. This article is published under the
Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and
create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to
full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at
http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode
The author and research team (Karin Tusting, David Barton, Ibrar Bhatt, and Mary Hamilton)
would like to thank all those who participated in the research and gave their time so generously.
Without them, this research would not have been possible. The author would also like to acknowledge
the Economic and Social Research Council, which has funded the research [award No. ES/L01159X/1].
503
Academics’
writing
practices in
England
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