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  1. Queen Mary University of London
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  3. Research Strategy
  4. Research Culture at Queen Mary
  5. Responsible Research Assessment

Responsible Research Assessment

Queen Mary is committed to assessing the quality of our research fairly and transparently.

What is Responsible Research Assessment?

Responsible Research Assessment (RRA) promotes fair, transparent and qualitative approaches to evaluating researchers, their outputs, and the broader community that supports the production of research, including technical colleagues and research professionals. RRA moves assessment beyond narrow measures of success such as journal impact factors and publication venues to recognise the range of activities that contribute to excellent research and innovation. 

Queen Mary's approach is informed by the principles of DORA (Declaration on Research Assessment) and CoARA (Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment), and is aligned with our wider commitments to research culture, Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI), and Open Science.  

Why does RRA matter?

RRA helps build a diverse research community and supports researchers to realise fully their potential, strengthening the quality and impact of their research. Traditional approaches to assessment can rely heavily on publication venue prestige and quantitative indicators, such as impact factor or citation metrics. This risks overlooking contributions such as datasets and software, practice-based research, Knowledge Exchange activities, policy engagement, and the contributions of technical professional services colleagues.

RRA helps create a more inclusive, sustainable and innovative research environment. 

Queen Mary's commitments to RRA

Queen Mary became a signatory to  DORA in 2020 and to CoARA in 2023, publishing our first CoARA action plan in October 2025. 

COARA's Core Commitments

  1. Recognise diverse contributions to research
  2. Base research assessment primarily on qualitative evaluation
  3. Abandon inappropriate uses of journal- and metric-based evaluation
  4. Avoid the use of rankings of research organisations in research assessment

Our action plan for 2026-2027 builds upon several areas of institutional strength in RRA, committing the institution to clear actions that will support a more holistic and inclusive culture when assessing researchers and their research. These include:

  • Recognising and rewarding the contributions of technical and professional service colleagues in our institutional annual Research & Innovation Awards. 
  • Revising the Queen Mary Academic Careers Framework to better recognise and reward the range of activity undertaken across our academic community, including Knowledge Exchange activity, policy and public engagement, and the commercialisation of research and licensing of patents and IP.  
  • Embedding training in the responsible assessment of researchers and their outputs into our central development offer, including workshops on drafting narrative CVs and bespoke training for colleagues grading outputs on internal Research Excellence Framework (REF) panels  

Resources

The Research Culture Team have collated resources for those wishing to learn more about RRA and applying it in their professional contexts. The resources are available for colleagues on Connected.

The Research Culture Team is always interested to learn more about exciting practice in RRA undertaken at Queen Mary. If you think you have any news or best practice to share, please get in touch with the Research Culture Team at Researchculture@qmul.ac.uk.

Any questions about RRA?

If you have any questions about RRA, please contact the Research Culture Team.

ResearchCulture@qmul.ac.uk
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