2015
Queen’s University Belfast has maintained its place among the top-20 UK universities researching business and management studies. In its analysis of the UK Research Excellence Framework (REF) results published on 18 December 2014, the Association of Business Schools (ABS) has positioned the school at 9th place in its ranking by research intensity, 13th place when controlling for the size of the faculty and 12th place in its overall sum of rankings measure.
The UK government conducts national assessments of the quality of academic research carried out at universities about every five years. In all, the REF assessors judged that 65.2 per cent of the research output of Queen’s University Management School published between 2008 and 2013 was either world-leading or internationally excellent in terms of originality, significance and rigour. The results help to determine what proportion of the UK’s £2bn-a-year research budget is awarded to the university. The ABS analysis of the REF results is likely to inform the government’s decision on funding allocation later this year. Professor Paul Teague, Director of Research at Queen’s University Management School, said: “This assessment will determine how much funding we receive for the next six years, and thanks to our excellent results we are very confident about our future”.
The REF results are also used to determine institutions’ rankings in league tables. A number of different techniques can be used to assess and rank the performance of a particular university, or a school or department within a university. The ABS has weighted the raw REF results to reflect the research intensity of business schools. This is a better way to place Queen’s University Management School's performance in a league table, as it takes the breadth and depth of research output into account. Some universities actively manipulate their REF results by excluding researchers from their submission, which puts them at an unfair, and unrealistic, position in rankings that do not take intensity into account. Queen’s University Belfast took a more inclusive strategy to signal that the institution appreciates the efforts of all its faculty and cannot advance without everyone’s commitment and engagement.
The full top-20 institutions of the Business and Management Studies Panel is found below. The index is calculated as the Grade Point Average (GPA) of the REF 2014 scores, multiplied by the number of academic staff (FTE) submitted for assessment, multiplied by the proportion of the total eligible faculty that was submitted. Professor John Turner, Acting Head of Queen’s University Management School, said: “These result confirm Queen’s University Management School as one of the leading business and management schools in the UK and Ireland. They highlight that world class research is being conducted across all four subject groups in the school. I would like to thank my colleagues for all their hard work”.
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