Last year, the UK had a giant review of all its university departments to arrive at rankings of departments by subject. This review was called the research assessment exercise (RAE) 2008 and my department (a physics department) didn’t do so well. Therefore, I had an extra good look at the RAE results. In January, we got some more details including a ranking of our papers. Each academic had submitted four papers published between 2001 and 2008, which were graded by a panel from 1* to 4*. The meaning of this ranking is 4* (world-leading), 3* (internationally excellent), 2* (internationally recognised), and 1* (nationally recognised). From my department’s result, I could work out a formula relating the impact factor (IF) of the journals to the quality of the paper as judged in the RAE 2008. The Physics panel chair Sir John Pendry vehemently denied a few weeks ago that his panel used IFs. That may be true but then my formula calculates the perceived quality of a paper as judged by our peers. I thought you might be interested in that judgement.

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