A guide to the REF for the shameless academic

Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat and, after a long wait, your REF results are on their way. Will you be merrily stuffing your face with turkey at the faculty Christmas meal, or shamefully struggling through a slice of humble pie? Only time will tell, but meanwhile, I’ll distract you with my idiot’s guide to REF success.

REF, which stands for Research Excellence Framework, is the way that the UK assesses academics’ research output. It works like this: you submit four publications from the preceding five years to a panel of experts who will then skim-read them and judge you mercilessly. Your future funding depends on their judgment.

If you think that seems like a rather incomprehensible and misguided evaluation process, you’d probably be right, which is why the REF has received so much flak. It also seems that unscrupulous universities have been able to game the system. One commentator managed to muster a “partial, qualified, cautious defence” of the process, but the overall picture hardly inspires confidence.

Research, research, research

At its core, REF is all about research. The best advice therefore is to make sure that you do lots of it. While elsewhere time is money, in academia time is research, so we need to buy you some time.

First and foremost, cease all non-impactful activities, particularly teaching. Ideally you should abandon your students completely, but you can always palm your commitments off on gullible colleagues, praising their expertise and inviting them to give guest lectures to your classes. Otherwise, simply skip the teaching, require submission of a paper only, and give all your students As or Bs regardless of quality (this will also save you time on marking). At the very least you should stop responding to student emails and cancel all office hours.

If you absolutely must teach, at least amuse yourself and make it as low-effort as possible. One US-based academic, for example, offers a course entitled Wasting time on the internet, the syllabus for which mandates “distraction, multi-tasking, and aimless drifting”.

In the event that you find yourself stranded without any publications, you can still take a stab at REF success by simply churning out a few semi-incomprehensible stream of consciousness pieces. There is always a small chance that the panellists will be so baffled that they assume that you are a bona fide four-star academic whose writing is beyond the comprehension of their meagre minds.

Be strategic

Don’t write a book or extended monograph: the REF makes no distinction between research outputs, so there is no incentive to undertake long-term projects. Also don’t bother with risky, visionary or imaginative projects unless you can be absolutely certain that you will get a publication out of it. No publication means no impact.

Publish only in the best known journals. Aim high: Nature, Science, the American Journal of Potato Research or similarly excellent journals are good choices.

Choose the panel that you submit to wisely. It turns out that the interdisciplinarians may have an advantage here as they can pick and choose: geography department showing you no love? Send your stuff to sociology instead. If you are a legal researcher, why not throw the chemists a curveball and send your research their way?

Have an impact

Once you’ve done your research, you should develop an unhealthy obsession with impact. Most of us have reflected on our h-index at some point, but if you want to be truly influential you need to work on your Kardashian index. This means amassing a huge Twitter following, thereby being ostensibly influential while actually contributing very little to society. Of course, you shouldn’t neglect your h-index completely – just artificially inflate it by citing yourselves 50-odd times in every paper.

Finally, you need to stand out from the crowd. I’m not sure how this helps, but you’ll at least have a bit of fun. Get yourself a TV show or write a cookery column for an aspirational magazine. Wear a snazzy hat, get a badass tattoo, and remember to dress for academic success.

There you have it. Now all there is to do is make a cup of tea, grab yourself a snack, and wait… In the meantime, send your amusing #REFtips to @AcademiaObscura.

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