Categorisation

4 March 2014 by 2 Comments

John Lamp, standing in front of a banner saying "Index of Information Systems JournalsDr John Lamp (@JohnWLamp) has been navigating the seas of academia for twenty years.

An apparently aimless meandering actually camouflaged a core interest in information, how it is perceived and categorised, and the dynamics of categorisation.

All of his academic life, he has devised, developed, and maintained the Index of Information Systems Journals and is currently Editor-in-Chief of the Australasian Journal of Information Systems.

In 2012, his PhD thesis “Information Categorisation: An Emergent Approach” was awarded the medal of the Australian Council of Professors and Heads of Information Systems. He can be found on LinkedIn, Twitter and lists to do with open access and research impact. His ORCID is 0000-0003-1891-0400. 

There are some fundamental problems with the Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classification Field of Research (ANZFoR) codes. So fundamental, that we really need to stop and go back to first principles.

Categorisation is one of the most basic things that we all do. Some of you have now categorised that statement under “things I agree with,” others as “things I don’t agree with,” and possibly many other categories.

For those of you who are thinking that you don’t categorise things: I’m sorry, but even that is putting things into a category. A very big and possibly useless category, but a category nonetheless. I often say that there are two sorts of people: those who categorise. 

A mind map showing ideas related to accessibility standards

Liddy Nevile – Accessibility at the ISO level: GPii, metadata and Globish, by Gary Barber on Flickr

Categories are useful things. It’s much easier to say “I like movies in which Colin Firth acts” than to say “I like <insert a list of all the films in which Colin Firth acts>!”. They are convenient short-hand descriptions.

They also convey an additional layer of information. Reciting a list of all the films in which Colin Firth acts requires the listener to decode the common feature of all those films. The use of a category, as well as defining something, highlights the particular attribute that the speaker is addressing. In the absence of that information, the listener may inaccurately group by director, country of origin, or another attribute. Also, the list will soon date as Colin Firth acts in new films, but the category description may not have that problem.

There are some real problems with categorisation, though. Some of them relate to simple mis-categorisation (how on earth did “health informatics” end up as a sub-category of “librarianship” in the ANZFoRs?), but the real bugbears are structure and perspectives.

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You are more than your FoR code

25 February 2014 by 10 Comments

Photo by Coley Christine Catalano - http://coleyslocket.com/ (Sourced from unsplash.com)

Photo by Coley Christine Catalano – http://coleyslocket.com/
(Sourced from unsplash.com)

Do you publish in books and journals that you think are best for your work?

While this may come across as a dense question, it’s a live and thorny issue for many scholars who are caught in national ‘research quality’ metrics that rank publications, particularly journals.

@thesiswhisperer commented recently that “[c]lassifying my publications by FOR code makes me look like a person who can’t make up their mind what they want to do”.

The title for this post paraphrases @jod999, who responded wisely with: “Your success says a lot more than your #FoR codes. Just keep doing what you do.”

If you haven’t yet encountered a national research quality exercise, I have two things to say to you:

  1. Congratulations – you still walk in the light; and
  2. If you’re hoping to hang in academia for a bit, read on to work out how you might negotiate these research quality systems when they cross your radar.

Research quality exercises are created as standardised, supposedly objective modes of measuring the quality of research being produced by research organisations (and, down the ladder, by individual researchers).

The systems are also constantly embroiled in passionate debate about their viability, accuracy, and scope. Is research output the best way to measure research quality? Dare we talk about research impact? What do citations really measure about a piece of work? How much ‘gaming’ of the system, for its own sake, takes place?

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FoRs and the Alleged “Gaming” of ERA

20 August 2013 by 4 Comments

Michelle Duryea, ECUMichelle Duryea has been the Manager of Research Quality and Policy at Edith Cowan University for over four years. She is responsible for the University’s ERA and HERDC submissions, research management systems, research policy development, reviews of research centres and research performance evaluation, reward and reporting.

Prior to working at ECU, Michelle was the Associate Director of Research Evaluation at the Australian Research Council, directly involved in developing the original ERA policy and guidelines.

Before working for Government, she occupied the position of the Senior Policy Officer for the Australian Technology Network of Universities. Michelle is on Twitter as @MishDuryea. Her ORCID is 0000-0001-9514-6499. 

Numbers (Photo by supercake: http://www.flickr.com/photos/supercake)

Numbers (Photo by supercake: http://www.flickr.com/photos/supercake)

Following a recent Research Whisperer post on ‘What’s a FoR?’, a Twitter conversation arose regarding the way Field of Research codes are assigned to publications for Government reporting purposes, specifically ERA (Excellence in Research for Australia).

This post is a product of that discussion and aims to clarify the role research offices play in preparing a university’s ERA submission.

More importantly, I also discuss the question of the impact these activities may or may not have on the publication practices of individual researchers.

In order to have a legitimate appreciation for what is involved in preparing the data about research outputs for an ERA submission, there are some fundamental ERA concepts which need to be understood initially, and which I will attempt to explain as clearly as possible.

Out of necessity, the following is taken largely from the ERA 2012 Submission Guidelines, so I apologise in advance for the “policy speak” but hopefully you’ll hang in there long enough for us to get to the good bit.

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What’s a FoR?

9 July 2013 by 2 Comments

Rank and file (Photo by Tseen Khoo)

Rank and file (Photo by Tseen Khoo)

The terrain of research grant application is littered with acronyms, new and defunct. There’s a level of knowingness about many of them, and how they are used.

For example, the Australian Research Council is always called the ARC. Not “arc” as a word, but by the letters “A.R.C.”. Mutual confusion can reign if two people meet who don’t speak this same language.

Within research development and grantsmanship, one of the elements held up as a defining characteristic for your application and its fate is the FoR code (pronounced as the letters, not as a word). The FoR, or “Field of Research” codes, came about as part of a joint Australian/New Zealand exercise to consistently categorise research and development (R&D) in our nations:

The conceptual framework adopted for the development of the FOR uses R&D activities according to the field in which research is undertaken and based on the processes and techniques used in the R&D. [my emphasis; ABS website]

OK, great, but what is a FoR actually for?

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