PhDs: Preparing for Impact

1. PhDs: Preparing for Impact LSE Public Policy Group 26 November 2012

2. Today’s session Introduction and defining research impacts Tracking your academic impact * Breakout session 1:Discussing your academic impact prospects Planning for external impact        * Breakout session 2: Discussing your external impact prospects

3. Defining research impacts

4. 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.

5. HEFCE’s definition of impact • 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. • Definition now explicitly includes raising the level of public debate and public scrutiny, public engagement, changing policy and practices, use by professional bodies. • But still excludes impact on research or the advancement of academic knowledge within the HE sector. And acting as an expert or advisor to a public body does not itself equal impact. • New Panel criteria gives guidance on examples of impact and types of evidence that could be provided. Encourages the “submission of a wide range of types of impact” in case studies.

6. All HEFCE’s criteria mapped Additional criteria: ▪Impact occurring in the last 15 years ▪ Quality of Underlying Research ▪Distinctiveness of Research 4* high exceptional 3* excellent medium Significance (or value) 2* very good 1* low good U low medium high Reach (or relevance) unclassed

7. Tracking academic impacts

8. Using bibliometric databases

9. Using Harzing’s Publish or Perish

10. Using Google Scholar Citations

11. 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

12. 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

13. Average H-scores by discipline and career position

14. 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

15. Output types by discipline

16. Origins of cites

17. 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

18. 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

19. Breakout session 1 What are your academic impact prospects?

20. Planning for external impacts

21. Defining external impacts HEFCE 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

22. Strengthening links from research to impacts via public engagement Direct contacts, auditable inputs a) Social outcomes changes or shifts, with b) Clearly positive benefits Impact on outputs or activities of external body/actors Under- pinning research • Intermediate • Impacts - usage, or cited, by external actors

23. Establishing core links from underpinning research to impacts Direct contacts, auditable inputs a) Social outcomes changes or shifts, with b) Clearly positive benefits Impact on outputs or activities of external body/actors Under- pinning research • Intermediate • impacts - usage, or cites, by external actors Evidence of (strong) dissem- ination Reception/ audience evidence Public engagement contributions

24. 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

25. 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, civil society)

26. Disciplinary differences in external references Deviation from the mean of the total of all references

27. Review of websites for references to links to civil society organizations

28. Just over a quarter of academic references were from external sources Civil society and third sector (7%) Govt & policy (5%) Media and press (5%) Individs (4%) Private sector (3%) Academic research and engagement Digital aggregators (4%) Independent think tanks (4%) Academic assocs. and societies (7%) Academic publishers and journals (20%) All libraries (14%) Digital research databases Univ. centres and instits. (7%) University departments (20%)

29. 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

30. 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

31. Academic blogging 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

32. 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?

33. Academic blogging: multi-author blogs 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

36. Overall 11% of external references to academic work in our dataset were from blogs

37. References to academic work in blogs vary widely by sector

38. Social media: Twitter 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

39. An individual academic used twitter to share a link to her work

40. A team from NCRM compared the effect on a paper’s downloads via twitter and other routes

41. 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

42. 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

43. 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

44. What constrains impacts? Private / public / third sector organisation Higher Education Institution • Lack of resources within external organisations to fund the KE engagement • Insufficient benefits from the interaction • Lack of interest by external organisations and lack of demand for KE • Intellectual property agreements as a barrier to some, albeit minority of, KE engagement • Lack of time • Bureaucracy and inflexibility of HEI administration • Difficulties in identifying partners • Insufficient rewards and lack of awareness of the benefits from the interactions • Lack of understanding by academics of the process • Capacity and capability of the KE system still developing / evolving Source: PACEC/CBR Survey of Academics (2008); PACEC/CBR Survey of Enterprise Offices (2010); CBR Survey of Enterprises (2008)

45. Breakout session 2 What are your external impact prospects?

46. 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