REF 2014: what did the law sub-panel members submit in 2008?

The Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2014 will use various tools in order to assess the research quality of UK universities. The most important one is that expert panels will assess four pieces of research output submitted by each UK academic. This leads to the question whether the panel members will prefer certain types of research output as well as certain publishers or journals. In some disciplines, there are clear preferences (e.g., in economics quality-rankings of journals are widely seen as relevant). Law is a complicated case since academics disagree on the role of proxies, such as the alleged quality of certain publishers and journals.

Now, the composition of the REF law-subpanel is of course known (here): thus, I quickly examined which four pieces the panel members had submitted for the previous exercise (the RAE 2008, data here). The 55 pieces are:

• 55% journal-articles with 77% of these articles in specialised journals, and 23% in general ones. Overall, no journal had more than two “hits” (these were Modern Law Review, Legal Studies, and Journal of Law and Society; no hits for LQR, OJLS and CLJ).
• 25% book chapters with 88% of these in OUP, CUP and Hart books (8 OUP, 2 CUP, 2 Hart).
• 16% books with 55% of these OUP, CUP and Hart books (2 OUP, 2 Hart, 1 CUP).
• 4% government reports (ie 2 pieces).

This shows a couple of interesting points:

• Occasionally, book chapters are seen with scepticism since they are not peer-reviewed. Yet 25% is a good share of the submission - though the strong preference for the top-publishers may indicate some hesitation.
• With respect to books, there is also a preference for the top publishers, yet, here books by other publishers (Ashgate, Palgrave, Cavendish etc) are also not infrequently submitted.
• Then, law journals, which is often the most controversial point with some favouring articles in a small number of general journals. Yet, in the REF-panel members submissions there is a lot of diversity with specialised journals dominating the field.

Finally, to say the obvious, the motivation of this post is influenced by the assumption that one may expect that the assessments of the panel members are influenced by their own publication choices. I think that’s not unrealistic to make, though of course one would not expect a perfect correlation.