RECENT RESEARCH EVALUATIONS IN THE UK AND PORTUGAL: METHODOLOGIES, PROCESSES, CONTROVERSIES AND CONSEQUENCES

The paper compares the methods, cultural and social processes, responses, controversies, ‘gaming’ and consequences for universities and higher education system of two recent European publicly-funded national research evaluations, one in the UK and the other in Portugal. The UK evaluation is run periodically by the UK Higher Education Funding Council for England (in 2008 it was called the Research Assessment Exercise and in 2014 the Research Excellence Framework) which provides research funding to successful higher education institutions, using performance-based data including research outputs. The 2014 evaluation, like its predecessors, was paper-based, with little emphasis on future plans. The exercise is competitive and selective and evaluates on a discipline-by-discipline basis, though funding is awarded to institutions. The Portuguese Evaluation mainly refers to the 2013 Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) and European Science Foundation (ESF) Research & Development Centres Evaluation. Like RAE/REF, this was competitive, periodic and selective but unlike the UK evaluation, it was organised around research centres with no institutional focus. The Centres could be single-discipline, multi-disciplinary or interdisciplinary and vary considerably by size. The exercise provided money to successful Centres both on the basis of both past performance and future plans.