Scientists go to law over RAE scores

Environmental scientists are planning to overturn their poor showing in the research assessment exercise through the law courts.

A number of university departments are hoping a judicial review could force the Higher Education Funding Council for England to reassess the quality of their research.

The discipline is still reeling from the 2001 exercise that ranked 18 of the 34 entries in the environmental sciences unit of assessment at either 2 or 3b. As a result, none of these will receive any research funding from Hefce. Just four departments achieved 5 or 5* ratings.

Some universities have responded to poor ratings by proposing to shift resources into other disciplines. Heads of environmental science departments are holding an emergency meeting in London on June 14 to discuss the situation.

Analysis of the RAE by Simon Watts, reader in biogeochemistry and RAE coordinator for environmental sciences at Oxford Brookes University, suggests that the assessment of environmental science was blighted. "Something has gone horribly wrong," he said. He calculated that the probability of the results occurring by chance was negligible and that smaller departments, of which there are many in the field, tended to do worse than larger ones.

He said that further analysis showed that, on average, environmental sciences departments had expected to gain an assessment an entire grade higher than that received. The average prediction across all subjects was far more accurate.

Dr Watts argued that part of the problem could be that the joint-assessment panel that looked at submissions included only two environmental scientists.

"My analysis implies that the panel did not do its job properly and that Hefce's quality-control procedures did not pick it up," he said.

Dr Watts said that one institution had decided it would seek a judicial review, though the issue would first be discussed at the forthcoming meeting of the committee of heads of environmental sciences.

He added that if the action went ahead, other departments were likely to back it.

In 1993, Hefce successfully deflected a judicial review that challenged the results of the 1992 RAE following a complaint by the Eastman Dental Institute at University College London.

While Dr Watts said a favourable ruling this time would not solve environmental science's problems overnight, it might help some of the departments that gained a 4 rating to boost their funding.

He warned that the alternative was bleak. His own group, which was rated 2, was already having resources diverted away from it by his university. He said that a couple of small departments at other institutions were in the process of being closed.

The RAE panel feedback report acknowledges that environmental sciences did poorly in comparison with earth sciences. But it notes that the average grade in the subject had improved since 1996. It also says that the number of submissions fell from 38 in 1996 to 34 in 2002 and that the average number of staff submitted grew from 12.7 to 15.9.

The report suggests that many former polytechnic departments chose to pursue environmental sciences after becoming universities in the early 1990s, in part because the discipline was broad in scope, allowing it to bring together small, disparate groups of researchers. At the time there was also a growing emphasis on environmental problems in society.

"As a consequence, many of the environmental science departments submitting to (the RAE) are relatively new and have commenced with a weak research tradition and infrastructure," the report says.

John Grace, president of the British Ecological Society and head of the institute of ecology at Edinburgh University, said an increase in the number of small academic units offering courses in environmental sciences in the past decade meant many had not reached a "critical mass" of top scientists. He believed this might account for the poor RAE showing.

"I don't think they have really got their act together yet. What we're seeing is a sort of immaturity in the way environmental science has developed," he said.

The BES is launching an investigation into the state of ecology in the UK after members voiced concerns that the number and quality of student and job applicants were falling.

This will involve a discussion on the BES's website followed by a data-gathering exercise this summer.