What is impact and why is it important?
Research impact is the contribution that research makes to the economy, society, environment or culture, beyond the contribution to academic research.
With the digitisation of research outputs across a variety of platforms and services, it is now commonplace to apply objective measures / metrics to identify how each research output can be seen within this context.
These objective measures do not in themselves confirm the intangible worth of any research output. However, they are used extensively to value the overall contribution of research outputs, to value the track record of researchers and to increase or decrease researchers’ opportunity for winning external grants.
Publishing for impact
Impact can be assessed through a variety of mechanisms:
- Researcher impact: The impact of a researcher is determined by the number of works they have published and the number of times those works have been cited. An H-index is an indicator of researcher impact.
- Article/book impact: The impact of an article/book is determined by the number of times the work has been cited.
- Journal impact: The impact of a journal can be determined by a number of factors including how many times the articles in the journal have been cited, the prestige of the journal.
- Institutional impact: Measures the collective citation frequency (collective impact) of the institution or department within the institution. This allows benchmarking against other institutions or departments of similar size and/or prestige.
- Societal impact - Strategically promoting your research helps the visibility of your work and increases the potential for your work to be cited.
Altmetrics is an emerging field in the of research impact metrics which captures the reference to or use of research outputs in social media, public media and policy areas.