Not making the grade? The assessment of communication researchers and their publications under New Zealand’s Performance-Based Research Funding

Abstract

This paper explores how the broad field of ‘communication’ fared under New Zealand’s 2012 Performance-Based Research Funding (PBRF) research exercise. It outlines how PBRF treats ‘communication’ as a fragmented discipline and how researchers and their publications are, consequently, assessed by different panels. The paper outlines possible reasons for the relatively low number of communication academics ranked as ‘world-class’, and proposes that communication academics take action to improve the consistency and credibility of PBRF quality evaluations in our discipline.

Keywords:

• Performance-Based Research Funding
• research evaluation
• journal evaluation
• communication research
• media studies research
• New Zealand

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to those academics and administrative staff within and outside New Zealand who supported the writing of this paper by providing their thoughts on PBRF and its evaluation of the communication discipline.

Notes

1. Aside from the many reports and other documentation which the TEC publically releases on the PBRF, all matters discussed in PBRF panels are confidential. The information presented in this paper is drawn from public reports, what information TEOs have been able to glean from PBRF panel members in attempting to better understand the PBRF assessment and from the community of communication scholars in New Zealand, many of whom corresponded with me following the presentation of an earlier version of this paper at the International Communication Association (ICA) Regional Conference in Brisbane in October 2014.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

C. Kay Weaver

C. Kay Weaver is the Pro Vice-Chancellor of Postgraduate Research and a Professor in the Department of Management Communication at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. She has published many journal articles and book chapters advocating critical approaches to the examination of public relations and strategic communication theory and practice. She also researches and writes about activist communication, gender, new technologies, and representations of violence. She is co-editor of Public relations in global contexts (2011) and Critical readings: Violence and the media. (2006), and is co-author of Violence and the media (2003), Women viewing violence (1992) and Cameras in the Commons (1990). Kay has taught across the fields of public relations, communication, media, and film studies in the UK and New Zealand.