Degrees of ICT Support

The amount of ICT used to support the preparation of the REF return was very widely variable both in the case study institutions and the pilot as a whole. One constant was the use of corporate HR systems for the staff table but for the 'outputs' and 'link' tables there were very different patterns.

Within the case studies, the University of Plymouth harvested output information from electronic sources such as online CVs but had no systems support for the collection or collation of the data and simply stored the data in the excel template provided by Evidence Ltd.

Bangor University maintains a relatively simple database for tracking its research activity and was able to use this for its outputs table. The University of Bournemouth has an impressive implementation of the ePrints institutional Repository which was able to produce an outputs table relatively easily but both institutions struggled with the link table.

Both the University of Birmingham and Queen's University Belfast have sophisticated systems in place including a data warehouse that automatically brings together details of outputs and staff records and consequently the production of the link table was simply a matter of generating a data extract/report in the correct format.