What is a high-quality research environment? Evidence from the UK’s Research Excellence Framework

Inglis, Matthew, Gadd, Elizabeth and Stokoe, Elizabeth ORCID: 0000-0002-7353-4121 (2024) What is a high-quality research environment? Evidence from the UK’s Research Excellence Framework. Research Evaluation. ISSN 0958-2029

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Abstract

As part of the UK university sector’s performance-related research funding model, the ‘REF’ (Research Excellence Framework), each discipline-derived ‘Unit of Assessment’ must submit a statement to provide information about their environment, culture, and strategy for enabling research and impact. Our aim in this paper is to identify the topics on which these statements focus, and how topic variation predicts funding-relevant research environment quality profiles. Using latent Dirichlet allocation topic modelling, we analysed all 1888 disciplinary ‘unit-level’ environment statements from REF2021. Our model identified eight topics which collectively predicted a surprisingly large proportion – 58.9% – of the variance in units’ environment scores, indicating that the way in which statements were written contributed substantially to the perceived quality of a unit’s research environment. Assessing research environments will increase in importance in the next REF exercise and the insights found through our analysis may support reflection and discussion about what it means to have a high-quality research environment.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2024 The Author
Divisions:	Psychological and Behavioural Science
Subjects:	L Education L Education > LB Theory and practice of education > LB2300 Higher Education
Date Deposited:	30 Jan 2024 14:57
Last Modified:	17 Oct 2024 18:10
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/121604

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