REF 2014 Research Power Ranking

REF 2014 results are now out (effective 00:01, 18 December 2014), six years to the day since the last round.

There are many, many ways to calculate rankings from the data – GPA, “Gold Medals” and Market Share for example – but arguably one of the more convincing ones is Research Power. Calculations undertaken by colleagues here at the University of Nottingham show an interesting picture:

Research Power

Rank	Institute
1	University College London
2	University of Oxford
3	University of Cambridge
4	University of Edinburgh
5	University of Manchester
6	King’s (College) London
7	Imperial College London
8	University of Nottingham
9	University of Bristol
10	University of Leeds
11	University of Southampton
12	University of Glasgow
13	University of Sheffield
14	University of Birmingham
15	University of Warwick
16	Newcastle University
17	Cardiff University
18	Queen’s University Belfast
19	University of Durham
20	University of Liverpool
21	University of Exeter
22	Queen Mary University of London
23	University of York
24	London School of Economics and Political Science

Research Fortnight Research Power Rankings 2014

Research Fortnight has a similar list with pretty much the same positions but with some interesting swaps of places, especially at the top:

Research Fortnight 2014 Power Rank	2008 Rank	Institution
1	1	Oxford
2	3	UCL
3	2	Cambridge
4	5	Edinburgh
5	4	Manchester
6	6	Imperial
7	11	KCL
8	7	Nottingham
9	10	Bristol
10	8	Leeds
11	13	Southampton
12	9	Sheffield
13	14	Glasgow
14	15	Warwick
15	12	Birmingham
16	17	Newcastle
17	16	Cardiff
18	19	Durham
19	21	Queen’s Belfast
20	20	Queen Mary, London
21	25	Exeter
22	18	Liverpool
23	27	LSE
24	22	York

The headline from all of this is that the reason I have only included 24 spots in the table is because each of the first 24 places is taken by a Russell Group University. In some ways quite remarkable but probably not actually that surprising when you think about it given the nature of the institutions and historical patterns of resource allocation for research.

Other analysis can be found elsewhere here on Wonkhe.