Professor Catherine Renshaw

Name (Individual/Organisation)

Professor Catherine Renshaw

Responses

Q8. With respect to ERA and EI:

(a) Do you believe there is a need for a highly rigorous, retrospective excellence and impact assessment exercise, particularly in the absence of a link to funding?

(b) What other evaluation measures or approaches (e.g. data driven approaches) could be deployed to inform research standards and future academic capability that are relevant to all disciplines, without increasing the administrative burden?

(c) Should the ARC Act be amended to reference a research quality, engagement and impact assessment function, however conducted?

(d) If so, should that reference include the function of developing new methods in research assessment and keeping up with best practice and global insights?

This submission relates to Question 8(b): methods of measuring excellence in the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) process.

Legal research in Australia is multi-faceted. It encompasses a rich and diverse field of inquiry, straddling doctrinal research and mainstream humanities and social sciences research. For decades, there have been debates in the discipline of law about the appropriateness of metric-based assessments of research quality. Concerns with metric-based assessment were set out in detail in a 2012 report by Professor Kathy Bowrey, prepared for the Council of Australian Law Deans (the Bowrey Report, https://cald.asn.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Prof-Kathy-Bowrey-Research-Quality-Report-to-CALD.pdf). In 2015, the Council of Australian Law Deans (CALD) responded to the Bowrey Report with the following statement:

In light of the serious concerns regarding metric-based research assessment raised by the Bowrey Report and the highly detrimental effect it may pose to Australia’s vibrant research culture in law, CALD condemns the blunt use of quantitative proxies for quality, such as (but not limited to) publishers/journals rankings or citation counts, and cautions against their indiscriminate application towards assessing research activity and/or the research quality of individual researchers in law. CALD notes that the ARC, itself, has expressed reservations about and resiled from certain ERA metric-based measures: notably, journal rankings, now in abeyance. Given this, CALD urges a holistic approach to the assessment of research activity and the research quality of individual researchers in law, utilising both quantitative and qualitative measures, without favouring one over the other, each being subject in the end to inclusive and respectful academic judgement.

If a retrospective excellence and impact assessment exercise is to continue, we recommend extreme caution in the adoption of any “data driven approach” to judging excellence in research in the discipline of law.

Submission received

14 December 2022

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