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Bella Reichard

Doctoral Student in Linguistics - Bella’s thesis is entitled ‘REF2014 Impact Case Studies - Description or Persuasion?’

Research project title

REF2014 Impact Case Studies - Description or Persuasion?

Supervisors

Dr Adam Mearns, Prof Mark Reed (SNES) and Prof Andrea Whittle (NUBS)

Contact details

Email: b.reichard2@ncl.ac.uk

Research interests

  • corpus linguistics
  • research impact
Research Excellence Framework 2014

A brief outline of the research project

My work is focused on REF2014 Impact Case Studies. I am investigating whether there are linguistic differences between case studies that received the highest score (4*) and those that received low scores (1*/2*). To this end, I have built a corpus of all known 4* Impact Case Studies from REF2014 across different Units of Assessment and another corpus of the known 1*/2* case studies in those Units of Assessment where high-scoring case studies are identifiable. I am comparing different language features across high- and low-scoring case studies. So far, I have compared keywords and lexical bundles, as well as conducted a readability analysis using Coh-Metrix.

Research activities

Publications
Conferences
Other activities
  • 2019: Invited workshop with the Office of National Statistics communications team about writing impact case studies
  • consultancy for university impact offices and academics in preparing impact case studies for REF2021 based on my doctoral research

Academic background

  • MA Applied Language Studies for TESOL, Durham University
  • MA Biblical Studies, Durham University
  • Undergraduate studies in Freiburg, Tübingen and Halle/Saale (Germany), Theology and Jewish Studies

Website

https://blogs.ncl.ac.uk/breichard2