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REF 2014 Research Power Ranking

The REF 2014 results are now out, six years to the day since the last round. While there are many, many ways to calculate rankings from the data - GPA, "Gold Medals" and Market Share for example - arguably one of the more convincing ones is Research Power.
This article is more than 9 years old

Paul Greatrix is Registrar at The University of Nottingham, author and creator of Registrarism and a Contributing Editor of Wonkhe.

REF 2014 results are now out (effective 00:01, 18 December 2014), six years to the day since the last round.

There are many, many ways to calculate rankings from the data – GPA, “Gold Medals” and Market Share for example – but arguably one of the more convincing ones is Research Power. Calculations undertaken by colleagues here at the University of Nottingham show an interesting picture:

 Research Power

Rank

Institute

1

University College London

2

University of Oxford

3

University of Cambridge

4

University of Edinburgh

5

University of Manchester

6

King’s (College) London

7

Imperial College London

8

University of Nottingham

9

University of Bristol

10

University of Leeds

11

University of Southampton

12

University of Glasgow

13

University of Sheffield

14

University of Birmingham

15

University of Warwick

16

Newcastle University

17

Cardiff University

18

Queen’s University Belfast

19

University of Durham

20

University of Liverpool

21

University of Exeter

22

Queen Mary University of London

23

University of York

24

London School of Economics and Political Science

 

Research Fortnight Research Power Rankings 2014

Research Fortnight has a similar list with pretty much the same positions but with some interesting swaps of places, especially at the top:

Research Fortnight 2014 Power Rank 2008 Rank Institution
1 1 Oxford
2 3 UCL
3 2 Cambridge
4 5 Edinburgh
5 4 Manchester
6 6 Imperial
7 11 KCL
8 7 Nottingham
9 10 Bristol
10 8 Leeds
11 13 Southampton
12 9 Sheffield
13 14 Glasgow
14 15 Warwick
15 12 Birmingham
16 17 Newcastle
17 16 Cardiff
18 19 Durham
19 21 Queen’s Belfast
20 20 Queen Mary, London
21 25 Exeter
22 18 Liverpool
23 27 LSE
24 22 York

 

The headline from all of this is that the reason I have only included 24 spots in the table is because each of the first 24 places is taken by a Russell Group University. In some ways quite remarkable but probably not actually that surprising when you think about it given the nature of the institutions and historical patterns of resource allocation for research.

Other analysis can be found elsewhere here on Wonkhe.

One response to “REF 2014 Research Power Ranking

  1. “arguably one of the more convincing ones is Research Power”

    The correlation between FTE entered and Research Power is .997. For all real world purposes they’re the same thing.

    If you’re interested in how big a department is then by all means look at Research Power. But you’d be better off just looking at FTE: then you wouldn’t need to bother running a REF at all.

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