What is research impact?
Researchers desire their work to have an impact, whether this could be in academia, in society, or both. However, there is no general consensus among academic organizations and funders about the definition of impact. We could describe impact as a term that contains two essential principles: effect and force. Effect in the sense of a noticeable influence and force in the sense of the strength or degree of this effect. The type of impact that's possible for a piece of work varies depending on the discipline.
What are the key areas research impacts?
Research impacts six key areas:
- Academic: this refers to advancing and developing of theories and methods within a particular field or across disciplines.
- Cultural or Societal: this refers to how research impact affects people and the environment they live.
- Environmental: this refers to research on the environment e.g. research on renewable energy sources.
- Policy & Legislation: this refers to the influence research has in the formulation of policies and government decisions.
- Economic: this refers to how research evidence affects businesses and economic growth or development.
- Health & Wellbeing: this refers to the development of new medicines or how it influences new medical practices.
Why is research impact important?
More and more funders and academic institutions stress out the importance of impact for both academia and society. So, it is extremely important to invest in making time to consider the impact of your research as this may help you:
- make progress with your career, as if you demonstrate evidence of your research impact you may apply for tenure or promotion.
- tell a story to an administration body, as faculty need support to apply for grants and perform essential research.
- secure funding, as funders want to ensure that they will sponsor high quality research that will also have a clear positive contribution to the society.
- develop recruitment guidelines within departments of an academic institution.
What is this guide about?
Making a real impact with your work, may prove to be challenging and time-consuming. Thus, it could make you feel that it is difficult to achieve it in the course of an already busy academic career. To that end, this guide was designed to help you with:
- familiarizing yourselves with all types of impact measures, traditional (metrics) and alternative (altmetrics).
- incorporating into your practice tools that measure the impact of authors, articles and journals.
- understanding how measuring impact differs across disciplines.
- broadening the impact of your research by developing your research identity.