What does COVID-19 mean for the evaluation of the impact criterion in REF2021?

The concept of research impact represents, to a degree, a formal way of understanding the productive relationships forged between academic research and the wider world. Unsurprisingly, these relationships took on entirely new dimensions as the COVID-19 pandemic changed the world. In this post, Gemma Derrick and Julie Bayley consider how COVID-19 is potentially influencing the ongoing 2021 Research Excellence Framework cycle and its analysis of UK research impact. Pointing to the ways in which the pandemic may have differentially influenced research and impact activities, they suggest this cycle could also hold lessons for the future in relation to longstanding inequalities within the REF.