  The Research Excellence Framework (REF) is a periodic UK-wide assessment of
the quality of published research in universities. The most recent REF was in
2014, and the next will be in 2021. The published results of REF2014 include a
categorical `quality profile' for each unit of assessment (typically a
university department), reporting what percentage of the unit's REF-submitted
research outputs were assessed as being at each of four quality levels
(labelled 4*, 3*, 2* and 1*). Also in the public domain are the original
submissions made to REF2014, which include -- for each unit of assessment --
publication details of the REF-submitted research outputs.
  In this work, we address the question: to what extent can a REF quality
profile for research outputs be attributed to the journals in which (most of)
those outputs were published? The data are the published submissions and
results from REF2014. The main statistical challenge comes from the fact that
REF quality profiles are available only at the aggregated level of whole units
of assessment: the REF panel's assessment of each individual research output is
not made public. Our research question is thus an `ecological inference'
problem, which demands special care in model formulation and methodology. The
analysis is based on logit models in which journal-specific parameters are
regularized via prior `pseudo-data'. We develop a lack-of-fit measure for the
extent to which REF scores appear to depend on publication venues rather than
research quality or institution-level differences. Results are presented for
several research fields.
