Data Gathering
The REF pilot project was run by the Research Office at the University and all the data was gathered and collated by the office. At Bangor the Research Office maintains a locally developed Research System that combines information on:
- Staff
- Research Students
- Research Grants
- Publications
This system was used to gather all information for the RAE 2007. After the RAE a project was started to update the system to form the basis of a university publications database.
To gather the data required for a publications database, the Research Office started with a single department and trawled staff web pages which varied in degrees of detail and completeness. Each participating department was visited and locally held CVs and publication lists were incorporated. Wherever possible, before being entered into the database newly identified outputs were cross referenced with external sources such as Thomson Reuters Web of Science (WoS) to build a complete entry for each entry. The staff carrying out the project checked the title, volume, pagination etc. If it was available the actual copy of the journal was also checked.
As well as journal outputs the University submitted:
- Conference Proceedings
- Book chapters
- Books/edited books
- Research Reports
- Patents
- Internet Publications
The publication table in the system needed to be modified in order to meet the requirements of the REF. (For example the full list of authors of a paper was not required for the RAE and this had to be addressed.) The Research Office found that WoS was not completely accurate and the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) and other sites such as CrossRef were used in order to get the full set of data.
Staff
Staff data was taken from the corporate HR system (Agresso). Deciding which staff were eligible to be submitted was a significant task and Research Office staff visited each school to confirm the lists of eligible staff. One issue was that category C staff were generally not held in the HR system. A further issue was that the academic departments were largely ignorant of the REF staff categorisation.
The University did not have any category D staff. Further information is available on the definitions of staff categories.
