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Ewen Green's main submission in the 1996 RAE shows why historians chafe at the exercise's arbitrary time limits. Dr Green, fellow and tutor in history at Magdalen College, published Crisis of Conservatism last year. But he began researching it as a postgraduate in the early 1980s and started writing the book in 1986 - first as a postdoctoral fellow at Brasenose College, Oxford then as a lecturer at Reading.

A study of the Conservative party in the early 20th century, it argues that the party was splintering by the outbreak of the first world war, which may have rescued it from disintegration.

The crisis both led to and was compounded by the shift by much of the party towards tariff reform.

His research took in about 60 archives. "This can mean 30 or 40 boxes of correspondence, each containing up to 1,000 letters" - and vast quantities of the press of the time.

He points to Oxford as particularly good for researchers because of the excellence of the libraries and extent of financial support available from both college and university.