REF2021 unit of assessment (REF2021UNITOFASSESSMENT)

Where a student's supervisor has been allocated to a UOA for the 2021 REF, then the student should be allocated to the same UOA.

Where the supervisor has not been explicitly allocated to a UOA because:

• The student's supervisor is not currently employed by, or was not employed at the time of the most recent REF by, the reporting provider, or;
  
• The student's supervisor was not allocated to a UOA as despite being employed by the reporting provider at the time of the most recent REF, they were not eligible for selection.
  

then the student should be assigned to the UOA which is closest in academic content to their subject of study. (The UOA chosen should be from the list of subjects defined by the most recent REF, not any future REF).

Where a student was supervised by more than one member of staff and/or these supervisors are returned in more than one UOA, the student may be returned split either according to the agreed division of responsibility, or in proportion to the number of supervisors. Where one or more of these supervisors is not employed by the reporting provider, and the student is not part of a formal collaborative arrangement to provide doctoral research training, their contribution should be ignored when determining the proportional split across UOAs.

Where the student is supervised as part of a formal collaborative arrangement to provide doctoral research training, the most relevant UOA should be returned for supervisors at another provider. However, UOAs are not required where supervision is provided by industrial or overseas partners, or any other organisation that is not eligible to submit to the REF.

Where a student's supervisors change within the Student course session, for example because the supervisor leaves, the UOA should be updated to reflect the UOA of the student's new supervisor(s).

This field occurs in combination with SupervisorAllocation.SUPALLPROP and SupervisorAllocation.HESAID.

Valid entry patterns are: 01-34 followed by a letter A, B, C or Z.

The first two characters are the UOA assigned to the student's supervisor in the 2021 REF. The final character is the letter denoting the multiple submission the member of staff was associated with or 'Z' where a multiple submission was not made. For example, if the HEP made multiple submissions to sub-panel 17 (Geography, Environmental studies and Archaeology) - one in Geography (17A) and one in Archaeology (17B); the respective letter should be included for the staff member associated with that submission. If the HEP did not make multiple submissions '17Z' should be used.