Cooked report?

Like parents unwilling to think ill of their charges, funding chiefs have decided to overlook some suspiciously naughty behaviour by some institutions. A recent report from the Higher Education Funding Council for England on conduct during the research assessment exercise noted that "in a small but significant number of cases" publication details were seriously wrong or the work had not been published in time to merit inclusion. This was put down to "genuine error rather than stretching of the rules".

But the authors note that this hardly offers a shining example of academic accuracy, adding guiltily: "it is open to question whether we should have taken a harder line here".