Category: academic impact

Disambiguating Impact

Outside of specific institutional and organizational settings discussions about ‘impact’ often descend into confusion, as the term holds several meanings for researchers. Responding to a provocation from Ziyad Marar “On Measuring Social Science Impact”…

Citation counts reinforce the influence of highly cited papers and nudge us towards undervaluing those with fewer.  

In the context of everyday research assessment citation counts are often taken as a simple indicator of the influence of any particular paper. However, all citations are not the same and can be deployed to achieve different ends. Commenting on a recent…

The social sciences struggle to be relevant. Can action-oriented research help?

How can the social sciences bridge the divide between abstract theory and idiomatic practice? Max French and Melissa Hawkins propose that one approach following this middle-way is ‘action oriented research’ (AOR). In this post they outline what AOR is and how it can make a strong claim as a route to relevance for the applied … Continued

Book Review: The Impact Agenda: Controversies, Consequences and Challenges by Katherine E. Smith, Justyna Bandola-Gill, Nasar Meer, Ellen Stewart and Richard Watermeyer

In The Impact Agenda, Katherine E. Smith, Justyna Bandola-Gill, Nasar Meer, Ellen Stewart and Richard Watermeyer bring together research about the impact agenda and its policies into one critical discussion to highlight why it creates the controversies, consequences and challenges of the book’s subtitle. Calling on the UK academic community to seize the opportunity to reshape the impact agenda in more positive and … Continued

2019 In Review: Practising research impact

The ways in research shapes and influences the wider world are a key focus of the LSE Impact Blog. This post brings together some of the top posts on the subject of research impact that featured on the Impact Blog in 2019. Invisible impact and insecure academics: structural barriers to engagement and why we should do it anyway Participatory Action […]

Multidisciplinary and cosmopolitan: how openness influences the academic impact of a scholar’s research

The academic impact of a scholar’s research remains of great importance to institutions, particularly business schools. Hyungseok (David) Yoon and Mustapha Belkhouja report on research examining how scholars’ openness to other disciplines and broader collaborations influences their academic impact, as determined by citation analysis. Findings suggest that the career stage of academics is an important factor, with early-career researchers encouraged […]