Letter: Voyage of rediscovery

I am mildly amused that Denmark is the latest country to discover that counting research publications devalues research ("Re-user friendly data", THES, January 26).

The same discovery was made by the Higher Education Funding Council for England in 1992, but was predicted by me in an article in 1988, when I wrote: "If one of the measures of research output is the number of publications, then researchers will write more trivial papers, increase that number by publishing work deliberately in small instalments and publish the same work in different guises. All these practices are known to exist and none is likely to improve the quality of research."

After 1992, Hefce changed its rules, leading to different but also deleterious consequences, this time largely for teaching. This too was predictable and I drew attention to it in an article last year.

Will they never learn?

Lewis Elton, Professor of higher education
University College London