Editorial: UK research assessment exercise

Preparations are well underway in the UK for the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), or they should be. The RAE is something that arose in the UK in the last two decades of the last century. However, the USA has toyed with the idea, and Australia and Hong Kong are on the verge of running similar exercises; therefore, the contents of the paper in this issue on the RAE by Cecil et al. (2006) will have relevance beyond the UK. The RAE is, essentially, an exercise in judging the quality of research across a wide range of disciplines, including nursing and midwifery, with the aim of helping the higher education funding bodies to allocate the research component of government funding for university research to universities. Research quality is scored and the higher the score obtained the greater the funding obtained based on a formula which takes into account the number of research-active staff: those who submit evidence to the RAE, in each unit of assessment, for example, nursing and midwifery. The exercise is conducted by peer review using panels assembled for each discipline. Nursing and midwifery has, traditionally, fared very badly in successive RAEs in the UK coming bottom of the league of disciplines and our performance therefore vexes many in the profession. Cecil et al. (2006) are not the first to analyse the performance of nursing in the RAE but they have added a dimension in their paper by looking for the types of publications that merit higher scores in an effort to help others to prepare for the 2008 RAE. Publications are composed of study types in the sense of methods, study groups and designs and they conclude that qualitative studies, RCTs and patient-centred studies are scored higher. This means, for example, that studies of nurses by nurses and studies of nurse education score lower. Cecil et al. also concluded that multi-authored papers scored higher. From the perspective of JCN the above is good news because the journal focuses mainly of clinical issues and patient care. The majority of our papers are multi-authored and we publish many qualitative studies and clinical trials. Papers in JCN were the third most frequently submitted in the 2001 RAE and it will be of great interest to see if our position changes in the forthcoming RAE. The RAE panels have been instructed not to take impact factors into account in gauging the quality of research but, with JCN recently increasing its impact factor and increasing it publication rate over the past four years from six issues per year to 12, there may be a greater tendency for researchers to see JCN as a good journal in which to publish their research. As a member of the 2008 RAE subpanel for nursing and midwifery, I cannot comment on the working methods of the present panel. However, I have commented on past RAEs (Watson 1996, Robinson et al. 2001, Watson & Robinson 2001) and have lamented the performance of nursing and midwifery. Naturally, based on the evidence we are presented with, I hope that nursing and midwifery ‘raise their game’ in 2008. As the Editor of JCN all I sincerely hope that the journal plays its part in providing the scope and excellence of nursing research in the UK and, with a view to RAEs in other countries, that is does likewise. JCN is, demonstrably, an international journal and it will be of considerable interest to see how it performs if Cecil et al. or their equivalents in other countries carry out an analysis similar to the paper by Cecil et al. (2006) in the present issue.