Preparing impact submissions for REF 2014: An evaluation: Approach and Evidence

How preferable and possible is management research-led teaching impact?

“…Without training, guidance, additional time, money and opportunity costs of surveying alumni and processing the resultant data, the continued reliance on individuals will fail to deliver. Thus, the most recent estimates for the cost of impact assessment of £55 million for the United Kingdom’s REF 2014 (Manville et al, 2015) is likely to rise. There are also significant costs for how HEIs are evaluated on impact.…”

Proceedings of the Conference "Impact of Social Sciences and Humanities for a European Research Agenda - Valuation of SSH in mission-oriented research" VIENNA 2018

“…The REF has been instrumental in increasing awareness of research impact in the UK (Donovan, 2017) and beyond, indeed becoming the model for impact evaluation in other counties such as Sweden, Norway or Poland (Wróblewska, 2017b). Advantages of the system include being based on and accompanied by several thorough commissioned reports (King's College London and Digital Science, 2015; Manville et al, 2014), the use of a broad definition of impact, which is likely to be broadened still (Stern, 2016) and the accessibility of both impact case studies and (aggregated) results of the evaluation through online resources. Weaknesses of the REF approach to impact, in our view, include a focus on the 'effects' of impact-related activities, rather than on the processual aspect and intermediate consequences thereof -as advocated by the productive interactions approach .…”

Beyond REF 2014: The impact of impact assessment on the future of information research

“…With more researcher time being taken up in the lengthy submission processes of top journals, there is a move towards publishing several smaller papers [11]. With ever increasing focus on submission, review and publication, academics may be spending less time on the research itself as a result of the ‘distorted’ influence of the REF [8, 11, 14] and that the goal-orientated approach of REF may reduce more serendipitous, blue-sky research [8, 10, 15, 16]. Additionally, there is a concern that academics will focus on the research which produces the best ‘story’ for a REF impact case study, rather than tackle important issues which may be too abstract to evidence in an impact case study [17].…”

“…An earlier study by RAND, commissioned by higher education funding councils, into how HEIs were preparing for the impact component of the REF found that panellists generally felt the impact assessment allowed them to assess the case studies in a fair way, and that they were confident that the criteria were reliable [15, 23]. A separate study by the same group revealed that one effect of being a REF panellist, both for academics and research users, was an increased awareness of the diverse range of impacts generated by academic research [21].…”

“…The RAND survey of academics revealed that the impact exercise increased ability to identify and understand impact and affirmed relationships with stakeholders [15, 23]. In fact, it found that while academics felt the impact exercise was time-consuming, external stakeholders did not find supplying evidence of impact to be particularly onerous [15, 23]. It is clear that the impact element of REF was a burden for HEIs, however.…”