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

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.