Category: REF

New Faculty of Medicine website

After a few exceptionally busy months, we relaunched our Faculty webpages on Friday 17 January 2014.

The new website has been in development for a while to showcase the work of the Faculty within our main research themes. In order to do this, research landing pages have been developed and the old and out of date material removed.

Our research on film

A large and exciting part of the project was to produce a high quality video for each ‘research landing page’ to more easily communicate what the Faculty is doing in each main area of research. Whilst the filming was completed in late-October (thank you to all that were involved!), the editing process took a bit longer than had been anticipated – trying to cut down the footage filmed in half in order to fit into the time allocated for each video was tricky.

We produced 13 videos in total: 11 for the research themes, another to give an overview of our research and one to better communicate how, through the AHSC and NIHR Imperial BRC, the Faculty translates its research.

Other objectives for the website were to:

  • Improve the homepage:
    • making it easier to navigate to key content
    • better promote news, social media activity and other content
    • increase awareness of the Academic Health Science centre and our other strategic initiatives
  • Improve the way we are communicating research across the Faculty:
    • Creating a much improved “Our research” landing page
    • Better communication of the AHSC, NIHR Imperial BRC and other strategic partnerships and initiatives
  • Review, reduce and re-prioritise content:
    • Changing our main navigation
    • Culling old, out of date and unused content
  • Audience focussed architecture:
    • Re-purposing “teaching” into “Prospective students” giving a better overview of our courses / education and in particular our Master’s degrees
    • Better information / signposting for Staff
    • Better content for the “about us” section
  • Preparation for the College website re-design / CMS project:
    • Details below

College website re-design project

With the new College website design and content management system (CMS) on the horizon, we have taken the opportunity to review content, and where necessary, cull out of date, old and redundant pages. This will make transferring to the new design and CMS a much easier, and less time consuming, process.

By using Google Analytics data (and information on when pages were last edited), we reviewed page views etc to decide what content was clearly not being visited and where content was extremely old, removing it from the website.

There is still work to be done to further improve the website and we are looking forward to getting to grips with a new content management system and college website design in the coming months.

We’ll be in touch with website editors and owners in the coming months to discuss and plan how the wider faculty website transfer process is to happen.

If you have any comments or questions, please use the comments section below.

James and Al
Digital Communications Team, Faculty of Medicine

REF and all that…

Well, it’s over for another 6 years, all bar the shouting. The Faculty finally submitted its REF2014 return on 22 November well ahead of the November 29th deadline, along with the rest of the College.  The hard metrics show that we have returned 435 FTEs (representing 521 academics) across three Units of assessment:

  • UoA1 – Clinical medicine
  • UoA2 – Epidemiology and Public Health
  • UoA4 – Neurosciences.

We take this opportunity to thank all our academics, our impact case contributors, our Divisional administrators and their teams and our HoDs for their unswerving commitment and sheer hard work to make this such a strong return.

UoA1 is our largest return with 334 FTEs representing 406 academics, which is over 25% of the whole College in one single unit. There were 34 impact cases presented – whittled down by the Faculty REF Impact Committee (chaired by Deborah Ashby) from the >80 impacts which we initially reviewed. These impact cases are completely new to this year’s REF so we, and all our competitors, are working without any precedents to guide us. However, we were really impressed by the high quality of the translation of our research into new therapies, clinical guidelines and health policies. Given the size and ability of our Faculty, we have high hopes of a strong result in UoA1.

In the last RAE2008 exercise, our Dept of Epidemiology, Public Health and Primary Care was joint 1st nationally in its UoA with 33 FTEs returned. In REF2014, we have returned 55 FTEs in UoA2 (61 academics), and six impact cases. We believe that the quality of our outputs is as high as previously, and with two new MRC Centres, strong impact cases and the creation of the expanded School of Public Health, we hope and expect to equal our performance in this competitive area.

We have returned 44 FTEs (54 academics) in Neuroscience, representing the College and Faculty support for the rebuilding of this critical component of our research base in Medicine, under the leadership of Prof Paul Matthews. The three Neuroscience themes have each demonstrated critical mass, high quality outputs and compelling impact cases; we are optimistic that we shall exceed our performance in this UoA over RAE2008.

This REF return is very much a team effort involving the whole Faculty, but the contributions of Lyndsey Pallant and Sarah Perkins have been massive and this is an opportunity for the Faculty to thank them wholeheartedly for their skill and dedication.

The results of REF2014 will be public in December 2014; in the meanwhile my colleagues and I brace ourselves for the actual assessment process itself in the Spring.

Professor Jonathan Weber
Vice Dean
 (Research)
Faculty of Medicine

REF Mock Exercise: Symplectic Elements

Symplectic Elements – what is it?:

This is the publications and activities database used by Imperial College London which will also be used for generating publication reports for the mock REF exercise.

Accessing:

You can find it at https://www.imperial.ac.uk/symplecticelements/ – you can login with your usual College login information.

This system automatically searches the PubMed and Web Of Science online publications directories based on your unique search settings. The automated searches take place at around 1:00am each morning and you will be automatically emailed once any publications have been found for you.

Your responsibility:

You MUST review any pending publications: decline those that are not yours and approve the ones that are. If you do not do this, the publications WILL NOT be returned in the reports being generated for the REF preparation process.

Finding and amending your Search Settings:

Once logged in, click My ElementsPublications Search Settings.

You MUST include the exact name variants under which you publish. If you have a common name, you might want to include some address or keyword information. Any changes made to the search settings must be saved for them to take effect during the next automated search (around 1:00am the following day).

Adding Publications via their ID

You can explicitly add the online ID for a publication if it is not returned in automated searches. This can be added through the search settings and choosing which online publication directory the ID relates to. Make sure you click the + icon to add the ID to the list to be searched.

** Important issues to note when changing search settings: **

If you add keywords where there were previously none, the search will become much more restrictive and this may prevent some of your papers being found. If you want to use additional logic terms to control the keyword search (AND, NOT etc), switch to ‘advanced view’ within Search Settings – Keywords. Alternatively, removing keywords and addresses will make your searches a lot more broad resulting in you receiving a large number of publications which may not be yours.

Online user guides:

Full information about using the system, amending search settings, importing, exporting and troubleshooting can be found online at http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/symplectic/userguide (login required).

Enquiries:

Lyndsey Pallant, new Faculty REF Coordinator

The first of a series of blog entries for the ‘Faculty of Medicine blog’ focusing on staff around the Faculty:

You are the new REF Coordinator for the Faculty. What does this role involve?

As the faculty’s REF coordinator I support the faculty’s preparations for the upcoming REF submission. Amongst other things, I lead on data collection, analysis and scenario modelling. I will support the faculty’s REF committee and ultimately manage the processes required to make a successful submission that reflects the strengths and capabilities of the faculty.

What are you enjoying about working at Imperial?

Imperial is a great place to work and the South Kensington campus is surrounded by some of the best museums in the country, so there is no shortage of things to do during lunch or after work. I’ve so far been to visit a few of the other campuses and been warmly welcomed by the staff at each location. I had the opportunity to take part in a very successful REF event for the Department of Medicine over at the Hammersmith campus and got to meet some of the academics I will be working with over the next two years. I’m sure I will undoubtedly get to know most members of the faculty over the next few months, as well as my way around London!

What is your background?

The hustle and bustle of London is a stark difference to North Wales where I lived for the last 10 years. I previously worked for Bangor University until my husband and I relocated to Kent. I’m looking forward to getting to know the area and settling into my position here at Imperial.

Key facts: