Research on Research: the research function and mission of higher education

The CGHE Research on Research project, led by Professor Alis Oancea, has involved a core team from Oxford and Bristol and an international advisory board. The project has adopted a multi-layered approach to understanding research ecosystems internationally, and has considered values and discourses; practices and outputs; organisational environments and relationships; evaluation and assessment frameworks; policy and funding; individual careers and perspectives; and meta-scholarship. It includes a comparative study of the weight given to research in academic life and evaluations, in relation to: individual careers, organisational environments, teaching and learning, sectoral policy, and relationships with other sectors, including publishing and industry. This is complemented by a comparative international study of assessment systems for higher education-based research, considering critically their role in framing arguments about the public contributions and value of research in higher education.

Between 2020 and 2024, the team conducted global research stakeholder interviews (n=72), complemented by analytic insights from a corpus of current and historical policy documents (n=308) mapping the history of research assessment in Australia, Italy, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Norway, and the United Kingdom. It also conducted multilingual interviews with professional and academic staff at different career stages and with unit and institutional leadership (n=98) and bibliometric analysis, to support case studies in 12 higher education institutions in six countries and across 27 research units spanning the spectrum of disciplinary and interdisciplinary fields. The study has also generated a global comparative analysis framework for research on research and a suite of survey modules for further research on research on different scales.