Counting on an Iterative Process: Initial Lessons from the Research Assessment Exercise 2008.

The aim of this paper is to present the early stages of a critical analysis of the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) 2008 which is intended to generate a model that can be of practical use in the Research Excellence Framework 2013. By drilling down into the research outputs available on the RAE 2008 website we intend to compare the context and methodologies used in more and less successful submissions. We show how an on-going study may generate results that are useful in progressing towards both discovering answers to the Research Questions and refining of the methods used. The results of the RAE 2008 in the field of Business and Management may have been disappointing for a number of institutions. However, the feedback in the form of the RAE ratings is difficult to use in making improvements to performance. This paper uses Westminster Business School (WBS) a post-1992 business school, as an example, and focuses on the Research Output aspect of the RAE ratings. It shows how a comparison of a sample of submitted outputs from this business school and those of two more successful institutions is a relevant exercise which reveals some useful areas for improvement and is worth re-focusing to provide more constructive feedback. Following a precursory literature review which sets the scene of differing but often not-quite-understood statuses of the qualitative and quantitative paradigms, initial findings suggest that the RAE outputs submitted by these three business schools vary substantially in terms of indicators of prestige and features such as topic area, journal rankings and citations; indicators of resources and professional network such as number of different topics, authors and location of authors; and indicators of methodology and method. The analysis takes into account the requirements of the 2013 Research Excellence Framework (REF) in order to progress. In this way the results of the RAE may be used to assist in institutional preparations for the REF. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]