PRIVATE SECTOR ALTERNATIVES TO THE RESEARCH EXCELLENCE FRAMEWORK FOR UNIVERSITY LEAGUE TABLES

摘要

This article has suggested that there are indeed private sector alternatives to the Research Excellence Framework that could inform university league tables. There are other, freely available resources which can be used relatively easily to create league tables of university research excellence. Based on how long it took us to do this work, creating the tables required for ResearchGate and Google Scholar at the university level and doing the same for subject levels might take a graduate student a couple of months. Indeed, one of the resources (Webometrics) is freely available on the web, already collated at the university level (and updated every six months). Importantly, it is clear that these other resources give ratings that are closely correlated with REF rankings provided by the Guardian and the THE, so no one need worry that using these data is going out on a limb, into unchartered territory.