Lessons from the history and philosophy of science regarding the Research Assessment Exercise

The Research Assessment Exercise (henceforth abbreviated to RAE) was introduced in 1986 by Thatcher, and was continued by Blair. So it has now been running for 21 years. During this time, the rules governing the RAE have changed considerably, and the interval between successive RAEs has also varied. These changes are not of great importance as far as the argument of this paper is concerned. We will concentrate on the main features of the RAE which can be summarised as follows

Letter counting: a stem cell for Cryptology, Quantitative Linguistics, and Statistics

Counting letters in written texts is a very ancient practice. It has accompanied the development of Cryptology, Quantitative Linguistics, and Statistics. In Cryptology, counting frequencies of the different characters in an encrypted message is the basis of the so called frequency analysis method. In Quantitative Linguistics, the proportion of vowels to consonants in different languages was studied long before authorship attribution. In Statistics, the alternation vowel-consonants was the only example that Markov ever gave of his theory of chained events. A short history of letter counting is presented. The three domains, Cryptology, Quantitative Linguistics, and Statistics, are then examined, focusing on the interactions with the other two fields through letter counting. As a conclusion, the eclectism of past centuries scholars, their background in humanities, and their familiarity with cryptograms, are identified as contributing factors to the mutual enrichment process which is described here

Special Libraries, February 1951

Volume 42, Issue 2https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_sl_1951/1001/thumbnail.jp

Accessing and understanding research in education

Introductory comments This chapter describes the range of evidence that exists relevant to educational studies, and discusses how to locate, read, and use such evidence. The evidence exists in publicly available datasets as well as in the writings of others. The chapter introduces some generic methods of assessing the quality and usefulness of evidence, including a key quality control principle. The chapter ends by outlining some ideas for future research

Special Libraries, November 1939

Volume 30, Issue 9https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_sl_1939/1008/thumbnail.jp