Impact has in the past two REF cycles established itself as an integral criteria of research assessment in the UK. However, the kinds of impacts that are valued and the ways in which the ‘reach’ and ‘significance’ of impact are interpreted by instituti…
Category: Impact
Rootless or rooted in regions? International researchers and local engagement
As universities have internationalised and academic careers have come to encompass relocation across countries and continents, it has often been argued that universities and their researchers have lost the ability to address the issues prevalent in the…
Planning for Impact – A framework for achievable impacts in grant applications and impact statements.
Grant applications and impact statements for research projects are important points for researchers and assessors to consider the future impact of research and whether the proposed pathways to these goals are feasible. Drawing on evidence from REF2014 …
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”…
We read 70 impact strategies from across the globe – we found only two different strategies.
Reporting on their recent international survey of impact strategies, Mark Reed and Saskia Gent discuss their findings, identify two main types of impact strategy and analyse six key themes that comprise the current sector standard for good impact strat…
We live in an age of projects – Research impact should reflect this
In the second of two blogposts exploring how research impact is increasingly dependent on expertise embedded within organisations rather than traditional research outputs, Rebecca Vine and Paul Nightingale discuss the role of projects as a focus for co…
Creating high-quality research collaborations across academia and civil society is rare, what does this tell us about how we value impact?
For researchers in Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) publishing and collaborating with academics on mutually beneficial projects is uncommon. Drawing on their experience of a major collaborative international research project on public attitudes towar…
Online Impact – Surveying the websites most commonly cited in impact case studies
Reporting on their recent survey of websites cited in REF 2014 impact case studies, Kayvan Kousha, Mike Thelwall and Mahshid Abdoli, discuss which websites are most commonly used as supporting evidence for impact and how these vary across academic disc…
What does COVID-19 mean for the evaluation of the Impact criterion in REF2021?
The concept of research impact represents, to a degree, a formal way of understanding the productive relationships forged between academic research and the wider world. Unsurprisingly, these relationships took on entirely new dimensions as the COVID-19…
Universities, Economic Development and ‘Levelling Up’ – How can universities make a positive impact on their local areas?
Based on the findings of a recent report into the ways in which higher education institutions contribute to the development of their local regions. Mark Tewdwr-Jones and Louise Kempton, discuss the complexity of aligning the goals of higher education t…