This blog is the first in a series of three arising from discussions during and reflections after a REntEd SIG ISBE/EEUK webinar called “Research vs Scholarship”. 

If your job requires you to “do Scholarship”, you have probably noticed two things. First, nobody quite agrees on what that means. Second, asking for clarification feels oddly risky and shameful, and that the question would somehow reveal your ignorance on a topic about which everyone else is an expert. 

But you are not alone in feeling confused when it comes to knowing what “Scholarship” means in Higher Education. 

The search for a definition

The REF 2029 defines research (see Section 4, 5.3.2 in Eligible outputs) as “a process of investigation leading to new insights, effectively shared.”. Professor Hannah Cobb of the University of Manchester’s definition of scholarship which we really like is “evidence-based systematic practice that positively impacts student outcomes or experience and is disseminated for critical review and, where appropriate, adoption by others.” 

Both are valid and reasonable but not that helpful if you’re trying to distinguish Scholarship from Research in your Performance Review or promotion application. The trouble is that both can be used to define a great deal of the same activity. Where there is a difference, it is less about the work itself and more about who it serves and which institutional category of recognition it falls into. 

The REF definition of research is very broad. Definitions of scholarship aren’t less clear or defined — they’re just less established as norms. 

From Boyer’s seminal work defining four scholarships (1990 – see Chapter 2)  to Braxton, Luckey & Helland’s (2002) inventory of scholarly activities (see Appendix B)  and the DARSHE framework (Gann & Hulme, 2025) to name only a small selection, there is plenty of academic literature engaged with the question of defining the full range of academic work beyond what typically counts as “Research”. None of it converges on a single answer as you might expect of such a diverse range of activities, but we argue that it doesn’t need to. 

Problematic ambiguity

The problem is that Research work has well-established metrics: citations, grant income, outputs in top journals, completed PhD supervisions, for example, and Scholarship work does not. This asymmetry creates a hierarchy in which Scholarship feels like the “other” thing, the thing that isn’t proper “Research”. Scholarship is often not as highly valued in institutions because it is arguably more complicated to measure, it is less clearly linked to REF funding, and ways to measure it haven’t been around as long.  It feels a bit like the qualitative versus quantitative debate where researchers can agree which sort of research they do but disagree on which sort is better. 

Education-focused colleagues in our webinar clearly felt this way. Some described a need for permission to do what felt like “play,” a sense of being watched, or waiting to be found out for working on something they cared about. Some described guilt about publishing when their contract gives them no formal research time, and an urge to be secretive, or at least not to broadcast activities that were not teaching, administrative, or marking.  

Asking a different question

Instead of trying to find a global and objective definition of “Scholarship”, just find a working definition for your own context.  Every institution will have its own vocabulary when it decides what counts and uses that information to make decisions.  

In practice that means: 

• Finding your institution’s definition of Scholarship – usually embedded in promotion criteria somewhere  

• Noticing the words it uses, and adopting them yourself to describe your “non-research” work 

• Pairing your work with a published framework, using the literature to validate and legitimise your categorisation. 

In these ways you can translate your activity in your context to so that it is legible to and consequently valued in your own institution. 

You have to be a bit of a shape shifter for your work to be understood in your own context 

Does this approach actually help?

In our recent webinar for the REntEd SIG (EEUK / ISBE), participants’ average self-rated clarity on the difference between Research and Scholarship rose from 3.2 to 4.3 out of 5 and their confidence in explaining it to others rose from 3.0 to 4.3. We think this improvement didn’t come from having access to new information; it came from being given a structure for thinking it through.

You can access the webinar slide deck here. 

Find out more 

Dr Kelly Smith and Dr Lucy Hatt have also created a companion one-page guide to give you a starting point using three lenses (contract, progression, identity) supported by some useful frameworks.  

Watch out for the next post in this series where we look at how to make the work itself more visible once you have the language to describe it.