How can next REF more strongly emphasise the unimportance of Impact Factor? | Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

"I spent much of yesterday morning at the launch meeting of HEFCE’s new report on the use of metrics, The Metric Tide: Report of the Independent Review of the Role of Metrics in Research Assessment and Management. (Actually, thanks to the combination of a tube strike and a train strike, I spent most of the day stationary in traffic jams, but that’s not important right now.) There’s a lot to like about the report, which is a fantastically detailed piece of work. (It weighs in at 178 pages for the main report, plus 200 pages for Supplement I and another 85 for Supplement II. I suspect that most people, including me, will content themselves with the Executive Summary, which is itself no lightweight at 12 pages.) Much has been written about it elsewhere — see the LSE’s link farm — but I want to focus on one issue that came up in the discussion. As we’ve noted here a couple of times before, the REF (Research Excellence Framework) is explicit in disavowing impact factors and other rankings in its assessments: see the answer to this question: How will journal impact factors, rankings or lists, or the perceived standing of publishers be used to inform the assessment of research outputs? ..."