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A ‘how to’ guide to measuring your own academic and external impacts

A ‘how to’ guide to measuring your own academic and external impacts. Patrick Dunleavy and Jane Tinkler LSE Public Policy Group Investigating Academic Impacts conference Monday 13 June 2011. Structure of this presentation . The ‘impacts agenda’ and PPG’s ‘evidence base’ Academic citations:

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A ‘how to’ guide to measuring your own academic and external impacts

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  1. A ‘how to’ guide to measuring your own academic and external impacts Patrick Dunleavy and Jane Tinkler LSE Public Policy Group Investigating Academic Impacts conference Monday 13 June 2011

  2. Structure of this presentation • The ‘impacts agenda’ and PPG’s ‘evidence base’ • Academic citations: • Where to start • How well cited are you? • Tips for increasing academic citations • External impacts: • Key factors shaping external impact • Differences across roles and disciplines • Tips for increasing external impacts • Conclusions

  3. 1. The ‘impacts agenda’ • There is a significant imbalance in funding for social sciences compared to STEM subjects • Plus cuts to funding for the university sector as a whole • It is important to be able to show the value of academic research in general • But also we all want our work to be seen, read, used and have impact

  4. 1b A word on PPG’s evidence base • Compiled a dataset of 240 academics across 10 social science disciplines from across the UK • Looked at their academic citations and their external impacts • This research forms the basis for our conclusions. New findings will be updated on our blog and in next iterations of the handbook • There is no magic solution but there are a number of practical things that you can do now

  5. 2a. Academic citations: Where to start?

  6. The inclusiveness of the ISI database for items submitted to the UK’s Research Assessment Exercise, 2001

  7. 2b. Academic citations: How well cited are you? Simple indicators can be used: • Your total number of publications • Your total number of citations (a better representation than citations per output) • Your H-score (the number of outputs each being cited that number of times), Age Weighted H-score or G Index (takes into account highly cited top publications)

  8. How the H-score and G-score works g index = average (mean) citations of items above h line only

  9. 2b. Academic citations: How well cited are you? Then take into account: • Your career position (early-year, senior lecturer, professor) • Your discipline • How you work (single vs multiple author, single vs multi-discipline, applied vs theoretical research, hub vs authority referencing)

  10. Average H-scores by discipline and career position

  11. 2c. Academic citations: Tips for increasing citations • 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

  12. 3a. External impacts: Key factors shaping the external influence of academics

  13. 3b. External impacts:Differences across roles and disciplines • Positions: early-years researcher, senior lecturer, professor • Academic roles: research, teaching, academic citizenship, academic management, dissemination • Disciplines: subject areas are more linked in to particular external groups

  14. External impacts: Differences by discipline

  15. 3c. Tips for increasing external impacts for academics • Most importantly, create an ‘impact file’ to collect information on all your external interactions • Consider alternative methods of disseminating research outputs that are tailored to particular audience groups • Research mediators such as think tanks or community groups are a good way to link into networks of interest • Use all available dissemination resources e.g. online depositories, seminar series, multi-author blogs, knowledge transfer schemes

  16. 3d. Tips for increasing impacts scores for universities and departments • Provide an overall steer on the value of dissemination and impact for all academic staff • Incentivise this through promotion and performance processes • Factor dissemination and impact into calculations of academic workload and time burdens • Re-evaluate event /conference programmes • Host online depositories or other dissemination opportunities such as blogs • Facilitate collaboration and linking to dedicated expert teams/consultancies

  17. 4. Conclusions • Maximizing both academic and external impacts helps promotion and career fulfillment – and via the REF it may bring additional money for your university • There are resources available to help, such as the HEIF fund - £600m shared across 98 universities for the 2011-2015 period • For the REF in 2014, 20 per cent of the funding will come from the external impact assessment, and a 4* impact case study may now bring in as much research grant as 13 publications rated at 4*

  18. For more details see: Maximising the Impacts of your Work handbook Impact of Social Science blog: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/ Email: impactofsocialsciences@lse.ac.uk Twitter: @lseimpactblog Facebook: Impact of Social Sciences

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