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David Cannadine lambasted the research assessment exercise for "inflating the quantity of output" and "deflating the quality" ("Flaws of supply with no demand", THES, April 23). He said that a "depressed professoriate" of fewer than 3,000 history academics last year published some 5,000 articles and 2,000 books.

If historians are engaged in a dash for trash, can an RAE that allows a maximum of four publications to be recorded over seven years be responsible for all this scribble, scribble, scribble?

David de Meza

Interdisciplinary Institute of Management, LSE School of Business and Economics, University of Exeter