Psychology and research assessment in the United Kingdom

Inglis, Matthew, Foster, Colin, Lortie-Forgues, Hugues, Simms, Victoria and Stokoe, Elizabeth ORCID: 0000-0002-7353-4121 (2025) Psychology and research assessment in the United Kingdom. Cogent Psychology, 12 (1). ISSN 2331-1908

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Abstract

What can we learn about psychology research in the UK, and its perceived quality, from examining manuscripts submitted to the psychology, psychiatry and neuroscience subpanel of the 2021 Research Excellence Framework (REF2021)? Using a latent Dirichlet allocation topic modelling approach, we identified 33 topics which collectively summarised the content of the journal articles returned to the subpanel. We found that the composition of submissions to the subpanel, in terms of these topics, explained a large proportion of the variance in the quality assessments they received from the expert peer review subpanel. Our model identified topics which were typically associated with receiving higher and lower unit-level quality assessments. In our discussion we pay particular attention to the fate of qualitative research, and discuss possible accounts for why units who returned a large amount of qualitative work tended to receive lower quality assessments than those who did not.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2025 The Author(s)
Divisions:	Psychological and Behavioural Science
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology L Education > LB Theory and practice of education > LB2300 Higher Education
Date Deposited:	30 Sep 2025 08:45
Last Modified:	27 Oct 2025 17:07
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/129639

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