Scottish university research has had wide-ranging societal impacts, including in drug discovery and clinical trials, the marine environment, museums and cultural heritage.
Lighthouse in Aberdeen, Scotland, photo by bomboman/Adobe Stock
The Research Excellence Framework (REF) is a system for assessing the range and quality of academic research conducted at universities in the United Kingdom (UK). It is undertaken by the four UK higher education funding bodies: Research England, the Scottish Funding Council (SFC), the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales (HEFCW), and the Department for the Economy, Northern Ireland (DfE). The corpus of REF 2021 impact case studies provides a rich resource for analysis and showcases the research undertaken at UK HEIs.
The SFC commissioned RAND Europe, together with Electric Data Solutions and Different Angles, to conduct a study to review the breadth and depth of Scottish higher education’s research impact beyond academia, as represented in the REF 2021 impact case studies. The 746 Scottish university case study submissions provide a rich resource for analysing the broader societal impacts of Scottish university research, reflecting Scottish higher education research’s diversity and reach.
The specific research questions included:
The study provides an in-depth examination of Scottish university impact case studies using a bespoke, mixed-methods research approach that involved a range of quantitative and qualitative analyses such as topic modelling, geotagging, text searches, bibliometric analysis, infographics and deep dives. This report is intended for a range of stakeholders including those interested in higher education research, the REF and research assessment, and more generally to anyone interested in the impact of universities on society.
For a comprehensive examination of the broader impact of UK university research, we recommend reading this report in conjunction with the separate report documenting our analysis of the UK-wide impact case study dataset.
