Sweden faces quality measuring tussle

A report due later this year will warn Sweden’s government against using peer review to allocate university block research grants, despite calls to the contrary from six of the country’s largest research funders.

The report, by Anders Flodström, a former head of the Swedish National Agency for Higher Education, will say that the use of peer review to determine research quality is too costly and cumbersome. It will recommend that the government uses metrics such as the number of publications in high-impact journals as an indicator of quality when allocating funding. The report will feed into the government’s next dedicated research bill, expected to be published in the second half of 2012.