Results of the UK’s massive assessment of university research have been released today.

Analysing the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise, my colleague Natasha Gilbert writes on Nature News:

Of the 52,400 academics from 159 higher education institutions that entered the RAE, 54% were found to be of an international standard, with 17% of these regarded as the best of the world’s best, and 37% judged as internationally excellent. Only 2% of the work submitted was judged to fall short of the nationally recognized standards.

This is perhaps unsurprising given that universities can – and do – just leave out of the assessment departments they suspect will score low.

Still, what the RAE should provide is a handy league table to give one group of students and academics an opportunity to look down on everyone else. Sadly it has failed to even do this.

There is mass confusion out there in the press over who is best.

The BBC says “Cambridge had 71% of submissions rated 4* and 3*, while Oxford had 70% – but that covered a slightly larger number of staff. … But the University of Leicester is rated as having the greatest cluster of world-leading researchers of any discipline in any university in the UK.”

A number of papers are putting Cambridge top, based mainly on a grade point average table drawn up by the Press Association. The Independent though thinks that LSE came out on top. And Imperial College in London has put out a press release declaring that it is the best, and has “the greatest concentration of research rated world-leading and internationally excellent amongst all UK universities”.

But wait. What’s this? The Times notes that “Sixty per cent of the research published by the school of Media Arts and Design at Westminster University (formerly the Polytechnic of Central London) was rated as “world-leading” by the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). … Only the museum studies department at Leicester University scored higher, with 65 per cent of its research rated as world class.”

Meanwhile the Lancashire Evening Post claims that “The University of Central Lancashire has beaten Oxford University in the latest research league tables.”

Not wishing to be left out of the party, the Great Beyond’s exclusive analysis of the results puts the greatest university in the UK as … err … say … Sheffield … or maybe Leeds?