Abstract
This paper determines the ranking of the publications units of assessment which were submitted to the UK research evaluation carried out in 2014, the REF, which would have been obtained if their submission had been evaluated with the bibliometric algorithm used by the Italian evaluation agency, ANVUR, for its evaluation of the research of Italian universities. We find very high correlation between the two methods, especially in regard to the funding allocation, with a headline figure of 0.9997 for the funding attributed to the institutions.
Highlights
In the week before Christmas 2014, university PR offices and common rooms up and down the country were abuzz with discussions and dissections of the freshly published results of the 2014 ‘Research Excellence Framework’ (REF), the official evaluation of all the research conducted by UK academic institutions in the six-year period 2008–13.This peer-review-based evaluation was the last in a series of such exercises, which have taken place at approximately regular intervals after the initial dummy run held in 1986
We find a remarkable correspondence between the methods: in the 18 REF research areas where at least 75% of the outputs submitted to the REF could be evaluated bibliometrically, the average of the correlation in each REF research area between the average quality of departments in the REF peer review score and the corresponding measure calculated with the ANVUR algorithm is 0.81, and the average rank correlation is 0.76; for the full sample, the figures are 0.63 and 0.60
Column (1) of Table 6 reports the correlation between the individual GPA scores calculated for the outputs of the various institutions that submitted to the corresponding units of assessment (UoAs) using the VQR algorithm (formula (5)), and the scores awarded to these units by the REF expert panel
Summary
In the week before Christmas 2014, university PR offices and common rooms up and down the country were abuzz with discussions and dissections of the freshly published results of the 2014 ‘Research Excellence Framework’ (REF), the official evaluation of all the research conducted by UK academic institutions in the six-year period 2008–13. This peer-review-based evaluation was the last in a series of such exercises, which have taken place at approximately regular intervals after the initial dummy run held in 1986. In the same vein, Harzing (2018) has shown that ranking UK departments according to the ‘departmental h-index’ correlates to the REF power ranking at 0.97
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