Ranking the outcomes from the assessment of research in the UK

The Research Excellence Framework (REF), previously the ‘RAE’, is an assessment undertaken on behalf of the UK government to gauge the quality of research in universities. It is a public display of reputation that carries with it considerable risk in terms of losing face and funding. The 2008 RAE focused on three categories of research output quantified on a common scale and ranked by the national media (and internally by universities) using an arbitrary weighting system. Using data from ‘Education’ as an example, this paper develops an alternative ‘justified’ weighting system for possible use in the forthcoming (2014) RE