Abstract
This article introduces the Research Excellence Framework (REF): a new research evaluation framework developed by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) to evaluate the research activities of higher education institutions in the UK. To promote excellent research so that its potential effect can be maximized, the REF has three criteria for evaluating institutions: output quality, impact, and research environment. Remarkably, although the purpose of the REF is university evaluation, social impact is explicitly included within the evaluation framework. It is proposed that output quality be evaluated by conventional review with the aid of quantitative bibliometric indicators, such as the number of paper citations. In this article, we introduce the REF, from output to impact, and make recommendations for the evaluation of research for universities in Japan.
