REF 2021 was delivered by the REF team, based at Research England, on behalf of the four funding bodies. This report provides the REF Director’s review of the operational delivery of the exercise by the REF team, across the period from its inception in 2017 until its completion in 2022.
This report analyses the representativeness of academic staff holding significant responsibility for research and submitted to REF 2021 compared to the wider UK population, of distribution of output attribution amongst submitted staff, and scoring of outputs by the expert panels.
Assessment of the research environment in REF should focus on the university, instead of discipline level, recommends the panel that has been piloting a new assessment process.
EDAP members Raheela Khan, Fiona Ross and Tessa Parkes consider what the analysis of data from REF 2021 tells us about how people from Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic groups have been able to contribute to, and assess, research quality.
