HEFCE commissioned analysis of the REF 2014 impact case studies.
The report The nature, scale and beneficiaries of research impact launched at a conference hosted by HEFCE at the Royal Society. This report provides an initial assessment of the 6,679 non-redacted impact case studies that were submitted to the 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF). A novel mix of text-mining techniques and qualitative analysis was used to synthesize the corpus of case studies. In order to help digest the large amount of data generated, a series of data visualizations are presented in the main body of the report. The headline findings from the analysis include: The societal impact of research from UK Higher Education Institutions is considerable, diverse and fascinating
- The research underpinning societal impacts is multidisciplinary, and the social benefit arising from research is multi-impactful
- Different types of Higher Education Institutions specialize in different types of impact
- UK Higher Education Institutions have a global impact
- The quantitative evidence supporting claims for impact was diverse and inconsistent, suggesting that the development of robust impact metrics is unlikely
- The impact case studies provide a rich resource for analysis, but the information is collected for assessment purposes and may need to be aligned for analysis purposes
The analysis presented in this report was performed at King’s College London. In addition to the report, Digital Science developed and produced an online searchable database (http://impact.ref.ac.uk/casestudies) of the impact case studies submitted to REF 2014, that is freely available in a form and format that will enable any researcher to carry out future analysis.
Alongside the release of the analysis of the case studies, HEFCE are also publishing an evaluation of how universities prepared their impact submissions for REF 2014. This includes a cost estimate for the exercise (see http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1032.html for report).
With thanks to our colleagues at King’s College London for providing this summary.