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…
Category: Impact
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…
Female researchers are more read and less cited because they more often engage in research for societal progress
The gender gap in citations between male and female researchers is well documented. However, the reasons for this gap are less certain and widely contested. Discussing findings from a mixed methods analysis of research publications from Norway, Lin Zha…
Impact Monoculture – Are all impact case studies the same old story?
The impact of quantitative research measures on academic behaviours have been widely discussed, but the impact of qualitative assessment regimes is more often thought of as benign. Drawing on an analysis of impact case studies submitted to REF 2014, Ju…
By ignoring tacit knowledge, we can tell less than we know about research impact.
Impact case studies, such as those produced for the UK’s research excellence framework, often present neat linear impact narratives that reflect the transmission of explicit knowledge from the world of research to the world of practice. Vincent W Mitch…
How models change the world – and what we should do about it
Models that make predictions about the COVID-19 pandemic are complicated by the fact that people change their behaviour in response to these predictions. Lucie White discusses how we can deal with this, based on a recent paper with Philippe van Basshuy…
In search for creative and embedded research impact
Funding agencies are increasingly seeking to promote more non-linear developmental approaches to research impact. In this post, Natalia Kucirkova, discusses how her research on children’s story making apps presents a useful way for thinking about resea…
The impact agenda in four acts – Or, how impact moved from concept to governing principle
The term ‘impact’ has become so familiar that it is easy to forget how much effort was invested in embedding it in British academia. Marta Natalia Wróblewska takes a look at the emergence of the discourse of impact in the UK and its transfo…
How to build and maintain trust at the interface of policy and research, insights from a century of boundary spanning
Trust is often invoked as a key ingredient to establishing effective relationships between researchers, their research, and policymakers. In this post, Christopher Cvitanovic and Rebecca Shellock discuss their research on trust in practice. Drawing on …
Lost in co-production: To enable true collaboration we need to nurture different academic identities.
Involving stakeholders directly in the research process and co-production have become common features of research designs aimed at delivering impact. However, in practice co-production often comes into conflict with more conventional research methods a…