'World-leading' analysis not confined to elite universities, says REF

The Analysis Excellence Framework, an evaluation of UK universities' analysis output, has discovered that "world-leading" analysis is distributed throughout the nation relatively than concentrated in a couple of elite establishments

UK map

Analysis across the UK has been referred to as “world-leading”

Muhammet Camdereli/Getty Photographs

The UK’s “world-leading” analysis isn’t simply restricted to a choose few elite universities, however relatively is distributed throughout the nation, in response to the newest UK authorities evaluation of the nation’s tutorial output.

The evaluation by the Analysis Excellence Framework (REF) workforce is predicated on seven years’ value of labor performed by universities. It assesses the standard of a college’s analysis output by way of how extremely cited it's and the impression it has had in each academia and the broader world. In contrast to in 2014, the final time this evaluation was performed, the REF workforce put a better emphasis on the broader long-term impression that a piece of analysis has had on the UK’s economic system, setting and high quality of life.

The outcomes will assist UK authorities funding our bodies determine find out how to allocate £2 billion value of grant cash between universities every year.

“There’s numerous myths about the place our analysis excellence is, however the fact is that it's extra broadly distributed, because the outcomes from this train present,” says Steven Hill at Analysis England, chair of the REF steering group.

Greater than 185,000 items of analysis had been submitted by 157 universities to the REF workforce, which had been reviewed by 34 professional panels. The panels had been break up into 4 essential classes: life and medical sciences, bodily sciences, social sciences and humanities and humanities.

The workforce discovered that 41 per cent of the analysis submitted was thought of of the very best high quality, which the REF workforce termed “world-leading”. In the meantime, 43 per cent of the analysis was ranked “internationally glorious”. Greater than 80 per cent of the analysis assessed at each these ranges of high quality was present in each area and nation within the UK.

Practically all universities who submitted analysis to the REF workforce had been discovered to have a minimum of a few of their exercise judged as “world-leading”. “There’s a extremely even distribution of analysis excellence throughout the UK,” says Hill.

Comparisons with earlier analyses made by REF are tough to make resulting from methodological adjustments, however the 2014 REF report discovered that solely 30 per cent of analysis submitted was “world-leading”.

“Universities play a key position in offering the concepts and abilities to gas the regional economic system that surrounds them,” says Brian Walker at Newcastle College, UK. “In much less affluent areas, these contributions from universities are disproportionately necessary.”