PhDs: Preparing for Impact

LSE Public Policy Group

1 December 2011

Today’s session

Defining research impacts

Tracking your academic impact

Planning for external impact       

Defining research impacts

      

Defining research impacts

PPG uses this definition: A research impact is a recorded or otherwise auditable

occasion of influence from academic research on another actor or organization.a. Academic impacts from research are influences upon

actors in academia or universities, e.g. as measured by citations in other academic authors’ work.

b. External impacts are influences on actors outside higher education, that is, in business, government or civil society, e.g. as measured by references in the trade press or in government documents, or by coverage in mass media.

Tracking academic impacts

      

Tools for tracking academic impact

Tools Pros Cons

Bibliometric databases such as ISI Web of Science and Scopus

Gives accurate citation counts (no duplications)

Biased towards STEM disciplines, US and English language outputs Only covers articles

‘Tweaked’ versions of Google such as Harzing’s Publish or Perish

Allows computation of citation scores

Covers all academic outputs that are on the web Easy to correct duplications

Open search via Google Scholar Citations

Covers all academic publications

Can link to both articles and co-authors Easy to use and will be taken up quickly

Calculating your impact score

Using Publish or Perish or Google Scholar Citations, you can calculate impact scores:

H score – shows the number of papers that have been cited that same number of times

Age weighted H score –adjusts for the number of years since your first publication

G score - incorporates the effect of very highly cited top publications

Putting your impact profile in context

Once you have your list of publications, citations and impact scores, you need to put these in context.

Your career position: Senior staff generally have higher citation rates and H scores as they have published more and have had longer for these publications to be read.

Your discipline: Some disciplines tend to cite more than others so generally their citation rates and H scores are higher

Average H-scores by discipline and career position

Putting your impact profile in context

As a PhD student, you are a ‘hub’ referencer, i.e. you reference a lot of other academics but don’t get many references to your own work. That gives you a particular profile.

Your impact profile can also be affected by: The type of output you produce (articles, working

papers, conference papers) Whether you work alone, with your supervisor, or as

part of a team or programme Whether your work is part of ‘core’ disciplinary themes

or crosses subject boundaries

Output types by discipline

Origins of cites

Type of Output LecturerSenior

Lecturer   ProfessorAcademic articles 72.3 75.0   74.8All book outputs 14.3 19.9   18.0Discussion and working papers 3.1 1.7   4.8Conference papers 5.0 1.5   0.6Research reports 3.2 1.1   1.4Other 2.0 0.8   0.2Not available 0.1 0.0   0.1Total 100 75.0   100Percentage of all citations 25.0 18.4   56.6

Co-authorship and citations

Most outputs in our dataset were single authored, but more cites went to outputs that had at least one other author

Top tips for increasing academic impacts

Pick as distinctive a version of your author name as possible and stick with it

Write informative article titles, abstracts and book blurbs

Work with colleagues to produce multi-authored outputs

Consider cross-disciplinary research projects Build communication and dissemination plans

into research projects early on Always put a version of any output on the open

web

Planning for external impacts

      

Defining external impactsHEFCE sees impact differently: Impact is defined as an effect on, change or benefit to the economy,

society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality of life, beyond academia

Includes the activity, attitude, awareness, behaviour, capacity,

opportunity, performance, policy, practice, process or understanding

of an audience, beneficiary, community, constituency, organisation or individuals

in any geographic location whether locally, regionally, nationally or internationally

Excludes Changes to teaching or on academic research

Strengthening links from research to impacts via public engagement

Under-pinningresearch

Directcontacts, auditableinputs

IntermediateImpacts- usage, orcited, by externalactors

Impact on outputs oractivities ofexternal body/actors

a) Socialoutcomes changes or shifts, withb) Clearlypositivebenefits

Confidential

Establishing core links from underpinning research to impacts

Under-pinningresearch

Directcontacts, auditableinputs

Intermediateimpacts- usage, orcites, by externalactors

Impact on outputs oractivities ofexternal body/actors

a) Socialoutcomes changes or shifts, withb) Clearlypositivebenefits

Evidence of (strong)dissem-ination

Reception/audience evidence

-

Public engagementcontributions

Planning for external impacts

Impacts take time to build up, your research needs to be undertaken, outputs need to be written and published (which can take years) and disseminated

However you need to plan for external impacts

And there are short-term actions you can take

Getting a picture of external impacts

We again used Google to track the ‘digital impact footprint’ of academics in our dataset. We looked at:

Their career-stage (lecturer, senior lecturer, professor)

Their discipline Where their work was being used

(government, business, community group)

External citations by career stage

External citations by discipline

External citations by discipline

Creating short-term ‘interim’ impacts

Academic communication now involves: Journal articles, conference papers, books and reviews Journal articles and books are read by few (subscription

only and high price), and rarely picked up by the media Outputs are often long and not easy to read

BUT social scientists are observers who need to communicate

their observations to the world (in a timely fashion) much of social scientists’ knowledge and input goes

unapplied because of very long time-lines for outputs, and lack of adaptation or translation

Creating short-term ‘interim’ impacts

So to create impact, your work needs to be found and be easily understood.

Step 1: Create a public profile on the LSE site and on Google Scholar Citations

Step 2: Use social media to raise the profile of yourself and your research, e.g. write blogs, write online book reviews, tweet

Why blog? Shorter articles: 300 – 1,200 words therefore good for

external audiences Easy to share via social media and email Searchable and available on open web Whole person style – where content may be personal as well

as academic Dissemination is immediate so too is comments and feedback Easy to start, with software such as Wordpress takes 10

minutes to set up A valuable job finding tool as employers can see more than

just your CV

Academic blogging

Academic blogging: single author blogs

You could start your own, single author blog. Here though:

Content is king, unless you post regularly traffic will die off

Some SABs are successful where the name is well known (Paul Krugman) but most SABs are now either shutting down or joining with other bloggers

Appetite for personal commentary/ glimpses of life has now shifted to Twitter?

So instead a good choice for academics is to contribute to a multi-authored blog. The advantages are:

Multiple contributors covering many topics or subjects, posting regularly and reliably, so that readers know when to return

All the admin work is done for you, and your blog is disseminated out to a wider network of interest than you could create on your own

Comments and social media can help build a community

You can get feedback on reader numbers and retweets via blog staff using Google Analytics

Academic blogging: multi-author blogs

Why tweet? Build up a network of all those who are working in

your area Quick access to relevant work that is being done Find out about events and networking

opportunities Disseminate blogs or research that you’ve done Useful teaching tool to keep in touch with students

or highlight research

Social media: Twitter

Social media: Twitter styles

Substantive - full sentences, independently understandable, a taster for a blog post

Conversational - eclectic content, professional and personal life, diverse topics

Middle ground - goes beyond corporate focus, more personality but still professional

Creating longer term impacts

Your profile will depend on how you move forward in your career, teaching or research only career paths, as part of a research group, university or external research organisation.

Build dissemination and impact plans into your research process

Work with colleagues on multi-authored and possibly cross-disciplinary work

Work with external organisations where possible, intermediaries such as community groups and think tanks can be valuable sources of impact

Top tips for increasing external impacts for academics Create an ‘impact file’ to collect information on all

your external interactions: meetings with people at seminars, email exchanges etc can all be useful to build an impact profile

Make full use of all the available resources within your Department and School: online depository for published work and working papers, blogs, media training, events with external stakeholders, HEIF funding, knowledge transfer schemes

Think about communication, dissemination and the impact of your research throughout the research process

For more details see:

Impact of Social Sciences blog

covers all key topics on advances in academic dissemination and impact

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/

Maximising the Impacts of your Research handbook

is freely available to download from the

Impact of Social Science blog

Email: impactofsocialsciences@lse.ac.uk

Twitter: @lseimpactblog

Facebook: Impact of Social Sciences