My two word summary of REF2021: everyone’s great!

Data mining helps us see how UK universities are communicating about their REF2021 results

Thursday 12 May 2022 saw the public release of Research Exellence Framework results (REF2021) - eagerly awaited by the Higher Education sector, but likely met with indifference and even confusion by the wider world, given the complexity.

I was interested in how universities were approaching their communications, especially given every institution would jostling to make themselves heard above the noise of hundreds of press releases, videos and social media posts.

I did some early stage data mining to compare how UK universities were communicating their results to their audiences and the wider world, using headlines from official press releases and news stories.

Methodology: headlines were extracted from DuckDuckGo news search at 10am, 12/5/22 (n=45). Results not appearing in the news section of a web site have been filtered out, along with headlines that do not reference an institution. University of Liverpool featured twice in the results, with different headlines published 3 hours apart.

You can find more information in my slide deck.

I'll update my findings in due course to capture a fuller picture, and add some analysis. If you'd like the full spreadsheet complete with all headlines, links, institutions and top lines, drop me a line at the email address in the footer