Research impact is an increasingly important aspect in securing government funding for research activity, NRF rating, institutional ranking and the management of research output within the university sector.
This has placed considerable emphasis on tracking citations of a researcher's published works and publishing within highly-ranked journals.
In the research community, citations are widely regarded as the most important indicators of research impact.
The number of times cited is generally considered indicative of an article’s academic impact, the assumption being that research articles of high academic quality will be cited more than those of lesser quality.
Defining impact
Broadly speaking, the impact of research can be academic or societal and therefore can occur within academia or beyond it. Mostly, when people talk about research impact, they are using the term for those impacts on wider society.
Iimpact has academic, societal and economic elements, which are defined as follows:
Academic impact is the demonstrable contribution that excellent research makes to academic advances, across and within disciplines, including significant advances in understanding, method, theory and application.
Societal and economic impact is the demonstrable contribution that excellent research makes to society and the economy, of benefit to individuals, organisations and nations. This is a broad definition and research can contribute to society in many ways. The image below shows the types of impact that have been used by the University College Dublin in their Research Impact Toolkit.
The impact journey describes how research can lead to impacts on society (and academia). It traces research over time, distinguishing between different five stages on the pathway to impact:
- Inputs: What researchers need.
- Activities: What researchers do.
- Outputs: The products of research.
- Outcomes: People becoming aware of, and using, these products. They generally occur in the short- to medium-term.
- Impacts: Changes in society that result from outputs and outcomes. Typically, impacts occur in the longer-term.
The diagram below demonstrates this pathway, with examples under each of the five stages. It is based on the W.K. Kellogg Foundation Logic Model.
Source:https://www.ucd.ie/impacttoolkit/whatisimpact/ ; https://www.ucd.ie/impacttoolkit/plan/impactjourney/