One means of fixing and making ideas tangible, often scorned and neglected in the social sciences, but widely used in STEM, are spinouts. For universities, a spinout is a company formed on the basis of intellectual property from a university or research institute.
Editor’s Note: This resource will evolve over time. If you’ve seen impact-related language on a grant application and would like […]
“In a world facing many complex, formidable problems,” Kenneth Prewitt asks, “how can the social sciences become a decisive force […]
Each year, NYU researchers analyze New York State Medicaid, New York City Department of Education, and New York City subsidized housing data to discover new patterns of family experiences and outcomes and inform new approaches to fighting poverty, reducing inequality, and expanding opportunity in our communities.
“Many people die without getting a transplant because there aren’t enough organs for the people who need them, living donor organs included. Sometimes, you might love someone enough to give him a kidney but you can’t give a kidney to the person you love, because kidneys have to be very well-matched. Kidney exchange is a way of getting some transplants done, even when patients and their donors are not well matched.”
Oscar Williams recounts his experience traveling to the Houses of Parliament with Sense about Science’s “Evidence Week” initiative.
Sorry, but academic publications in themselves are less likely to merit impact, though; if researchers want to reach beyond the ivy tower of academia, there are certain steps they can take. Why not consider a campaign? Toby Green discusses the imperative to ensure that researchers are seeking and finding proper audiences if they intend to cause impact. Researchers who do so will be more visible, and they’re more likely to win grants.
A key political driver of open access and open science policies has been the potential economic benefits that they could deliver to public and private knowledge users. However, the empirical evidence for these claims is rarely substantiated. In this post Michael Fell, discusses how open research can lead to economic benefits and suggests that if these benefits are to be more widely realized, future open research policies should focus on developing research discovery, translation and the capacity for research utilization outside of the academy.
To end his trilogy of articles on the research metric system (and Google Scholar in particular), Louis Coiffait explores what improvements could be made.
Louis Coiffait’s third article in his series on impact looks at the system of citation metrics, in particular Google Scholar.
In his second article in a series on impact, Louis Coiffait looks at how REF and KEF treat impact in the UK.
For social scientists, there must be a concern that a generation’s worth of accumulated empirical evidence on effective leadership has made so little impact on the candidates in the upcoming General Election in the United Kingdom.
