Research Excellence and Evaluation Using a CRIS: A Cross-institutional Perspective

This paper describes the preparation of King's College London for the Research Excellence Framework (REF), a major UK research evaluation exercise. King's is a large multi-campus, multi-faculty institution, submitting to the majority of the REF Units of Assessment (UoAs). The preparation of REF data was substantially managed via a commercial CRIS system, Pure, developed by Elsevier (Atira), which was implemented in stages at King's during 2012-3. Both during the submission preparation and after completion, views were taken on the benefits and issues with the use of Pure for the REF across a wide spectrum of the College. The views of users are presented in this paper from different perspectives, including that of senior management, with an analysis of the differing behavior of UoAs across the College.