* wanders in, bleary eyed, wondering if there's any REF2014 chat ... wanders out again *

hi @EnergyNumbers

@EnergyNumbers I love how Uni's are misrepresenting the data. Just because x percent of the submitted research was rated y, doesn't mean that percentage of all your research is y. My uni and school are pretty happy with the results.

@StrongBad Yup - there are so many ways to carve up the data, that it seems that almost everyone can claim success from it. My university, faculty and department are all happy - there'll be celebration drinks in a few hours. Then come March we'll see how it translates into funding, and we'll all know who the real winners and losers are. At the moment, it does look a lot like the golden triangle will get a bit more gold.

@StrongBad You're unit 4, aren't you? Nice result. We're in unit 16, which says more about where we spawned, 5 years ago, than about what we do now.

@SabreTooth Hi there - I really did wander out about as soon as I wandered in. I'd forgotten that today was the once-every-6-years review of all UK university research, got up in the middle of the night to put the cats out, and saw the news that my faculty and university had done pretty well. Which should turn into a higher share of national funding. But we'll have to wait until March at least, to find out what the actual funding is.

@EnergyNumbers Are you guys really that much bigger than everybody else in your field?

@StrongBad Sort of. We've grown a lot: my department was 3 people, 5 years ago. Now there's well over 150, staff + PhD students. We've got a very broad faculty, and I guess more than half of us could have been in one of several different units. We're a multi-disciplinary institute that just happens to have landed in UoA 16. But yeah, as energy departments go, we're big; and as built environment faculties go, we're big.

And at least as important as all that, is that a strategic decision was made at university level, and endorsed at faculty and department level, to go into REF2014 heavy on quantity, even though that meant diluting quality a bit.

So our average paper weighting is lower than it could otherwise have been. We've aimed at maximising the product of quality times quantity, and seem to have acheived that.

@EnergyNumbers I think that is what the vast majority of the RG did. The university wanted us to go bigger, but we ran out of impact statements.

For those of us who are out of the loop, I'd love to read this report. <_<

staff.city.ac.uk/~jwo/refviewer

@Compass the above is a nice interactive viewer of the UK REF. I am not sure there is a report yet, as much as just the "raw" numbers. No every university gets to figure out what combination of numbers makes them look best so that there will be at least 20 universities/departments in the top 10.

@Compass There's a supplement pdf linked to a quarter of the way down this page:- exquisitelife.researchresearch.com/exquisite_life/2014/12/… - which is a pretty decent overview. They've also got league tables for each of the 36 units of assessment.

And I expect twitter to be alight with #ref2014 discussion - twitter.com/search?q=%23ref2014&src=typd

Wow, a research report card. I guess the US doesn't have anything like this O_O

@Compass Is there a national research assessment framework that determines the funding levels of public universities in the USA? When was the most recent?

I have never heard of one @EnergyNumbers there seem to be independent private studies, but nothing that appears as nationalized and formal as REF

for example: huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/27/…

The fact that 20% of federal funding goes to 1% of schools in the US is not surprising in the least, as well.