‘Gaming system’: call to reform assessments of university academics, at Life Sciences Qld TRX16 conference

AUSTRALIA’S got great university academics. But the way they get assessed is wrong, a conference into commercialising life-science tech has heard.

Call for shake-up: Dr Melanie Thomson.

THE system for measuring academics’ performance needs a shake-up to boost innovation, a conference on commercialising life-science research heard on Friday.

“The metrics we use in academia are perverse to the behaviours we want to incentivise,” Professor Jennifer Martin, director of Griffith University’s Eskitis Institute for Drug Discovery, said.

People currently were assessed on metrics such as how many papers they wrote, how many citations that paper gets or how many grants they obtained, she said.

These were then translated into numbers that “mean nothing to the person on the street (but) that’s what everybody’s chasing because that’s what drives promotions and value”.

Speaking at the Life Sciences Queensland TRX16 conference, Prof Martin said this system was driven by international rankings of universities, which use the same numbers.

“We need governments to lobby those international rankings to change those measures. Because they’re meant to identify the best places to go and do your study or research or work,” she said.

Prof Martin suggested other metrics such as an academic’s engagement with end-users could be a useful metric. “Like if you’re working in medical research … talking to patients and clinicians to make sure the research they’re working on is actually relevant to the problem,” she said.

Dr Melanie Thomson of the MedTech Pharma Industry Growth Centre also argued the current performance measures could drive universities to seek things other than commercial outcomes. “It would be great if we could change the metrics so they would be wider,” she told the conference.

“The universities are all trying to game each other, game the metrics, to go up the rankings, because that’s the new trendy buzzword,” she said.

Dr Thomson, who has used crowd-funding in previous work, said one possible new metric would be to count academics talking to the public about their science work. While not innovation, she said public talks would form part of the social licence for public backing of scientists’ work.