How to interpret our results

REF is measured in three dimensions: outputs, impact, and environment. Read more on how REF is measured. 

Excellence is assessed separately against different criteria for Outputs, Impact, and Environment, and is undertaken by Unit of Assessment (UoA). A separate quality sub-profile is produced for each dimension, indicating what proportion of the submission to a given UoA was judged as meeting the relevant criteria for each quality rating. The individual quality sub-profiles can be combined into an Overall research quality profile for the UoA.

The results include individual sub-profiles for outputs, impact, and environment, for each submission to each unit of assessment. An example sub-profile for outputs appears below, which shows that 26 percent of the submitted outputs met the assessment criteria for four-star:

The quality spectrum of a sub-profile can also be presented as a grade point average (GPA). This is calculated by totalling the percentage of research at each quality level multiplied by the star rating. This will result in a value between a minimum of 0.0, if 100% of research was judged to be unclassified, and a maximum of 4.0 if 100% of research was judged four-star.

In the above example, the GPA for outputs can be calculated from the sub-profile as follows:

GPA = 4 x 26% + 3 x 52% + 2 x 17% + 1 x 4% = 2.98

The three individual sub-profiles – outputs, impact and environment – will also be combined by the REF team into an overall quality profile, which will show the percentage of the body of assessed evidence that fell into each quality category. This is produced by combining the percentage in each quality rating, weighted 60:25:15 for outputs, impact, and environment, respectively. An overall GPA can then be calculated from the overall quality profile.

It is not quality of research alone that is important, but the capacity and capability of an institution to deliver high-quality research at scale within a UoA. A measure, termed ‘research power’can be derived from the product of overall research quality and submitted volume of staff, e.g., 25 FTE staff in a unit judged 3.00 GPA overall would equate to a research power of 75.

REF2021 rewards research excellence by allocating quality related (QR) funding to universities, based on their performance in each submitted UoA. The total allocation of QR funding is calculated from the quality and volume of four-star and three-star research, using the full-time equivalent (FTE) of staff submitted to the UoA as the volume measure. Therefore, a submission with a higher percentage of four-star and three-star research will receive more QR funding per FTE. A submission in the same UoA with the same quality profile but twice the submitted FTE will receive twice the QR funding, so it is four-star and three-star research power that is rewarded by QR.