We are better than you? REF edition

Frank Popham
2022-05-12

The research excellence framework represents another opportunity for universities in the UK to boast they are better than their peers. In this article Marcus Manufò highlighted how Glasgow had pre-registered that they

will focus on collegiality over superiority, avoiding unnecessary comparisons and presenting the results as evidence of Glasgow’s significant contribution to the collaborative research endeavour. As a first check I scraped every REF result related tweet from the main account of Russell Group universities on the 12th May 2022 up to midday. These are 24 “leading” universities. They are republished below by university. I have tried to exclude non-relevant tweets and also retweets. Exeter and Nottingham’s accounts had not tweeted anything about REF results by noon.

Make your own mind up about how Glasgow compares in its tweets to the others. I thought there was less comparison than I was expecting.

The code to reproduce the analysis is here. Thanks to R, Rstudio, tidyverse, rtweet, tweetrmd for making this easy to do and distill for making the blog easy to produce.

Citation

For attribution, please cite this work as

Popham (2022, May 12). Frank Popham: We are better than you? REF edition. Retrieved from https://www.frankpopham.com/posts/2022-05-12-we-are-better-than-you-so-there/

BibTeX citation

@misc{popham2022we,
  author = {Popham, Frank},
  title = {Frank Popham: We are better than you? REF edition},
  url = {https://www.frankpopham.com/posts/2022-05-12-we-are-better-than-you-so-there/},
  year = {2022}
}