As anyone who has attended my trainings will know, I’m not the world’s biggest fan of the Research Excellence Framework (REF2021). I see it is part of my job to undermine the all-pervasive dominance of REF in UK academic life, by encouraging researchers to stop chasing their 4* impact case study, and remember why they originally fell in love with research. Most people didn’t fall in love with impact – they fell in love with curiosity and that’s what drives them to this day. M

View an updated version of this blog In 2014, the UK became the first country to comprehensively assess the impact of its research as part of a national assessment. Although scores were not made public for individual cases, we looked for institutions whose case studies were all given grades in the same range to identify 175 (out of 7,000) high- or low-scoring case studies from a cross-section of disciplines. We combined qualitative thematic analysis with quantitative linguist

The REF rules are clear: impacts remain with the institution in which the original research was conducted. If you move institutions, you can’t take your case study with you. Or can you? I am regularly asked by researchers about how they might be able to claim impacts at institutions they have moved to, and often there is little hope. However, there are a number of examples in the REF2014 database of case studies that appeared to follow their authors, and were submitted by bot

No one will disagree that research is supposed to benefit society, and that research and researchers should be evaluated for their contribution to this societal mission. It therefore comes as an inconvenient truth to those impact evaluation proponents that a fair and robust evaluation of societal impact needs to balance a celebration of positive impacts, while acknowledging those that do not “benefit” society. Impact is different to everyone. As we have increasingly seen late

This blog has now been updated. To see the original version, download the poster below presented at the INORMS 2018 conference. For the latest findings from this research, see the guide: What makes a 4* impact case study for REF2021? #REF2014 #REF2021

What would you do if you were asked to organise an internal review of REF impact case studies for your whole university? Run away? Hide? Look at what everyone else is doing? As the two Impact Managers for Northumbria University given this task, running away and hiding was not an option. Learning from the experience of other institutions was also not an option, since it is difficult to find publically available information about internal processes for assessing impact. In this

The role and shape of impact in the next REF just got a lot clearer with the publication of HEFCE’s consultation on the second Research Excellence Framework last week. There were no big surprises, with the focus on how not if to implement Stern’s recent recommendations. However there are a few significant revelations we can glean from the consultation: Institution-level case studies could play a major role in the next REF, accounting for 10-20% or up to 25% of impact scores i