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There is increasing focus to review the societal impact of research through assessment and research excellence frameworks. These often link to financial and reputational incentives within the academic community. However, timeframes to demonstrate impact using these approaches are often long and are not designed to show benefit to service collaborators who require evidence of improvement and change to their services more immediately. Impacts that are measured this way may also miss out on unintended and positive impacts that occur as by-products of research, or through the 'ripple effect' that research may have on practice. Importantly, demonstrating how research makes a difference can improve the research culture in services, and motivations in service partners to become, and stay involved in research. This article describes, and provides access to, a tool called VICTOR (making Visible the ImpaCT Of Research) that was developed by a community of practice involving 12 NHS organisations through blending evidence from the literature, practice and service users. We describe the types of impact that have been collected by VICTOR and explore how collecting impact in this way might help research-practice partnerships and inform research methodologies and may be useful to show impacts alongside, and shortly after the research process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Refusal remains a core concern in processes of research across the sciences. Drawing on previous anthropological theorisations, this paper contemplates on the manifold 'arts' of refusal during ethnographic research praxis, drawing on diverse thematic experiences and contexts across coastal India, Malaysia, and Uganda. We argue for a concerted engagement with refusal as more than an act of withholding co-operation and as an expression of resistance. While recognizing refusal as a locally situated and historically contingent sensibility, we ask in what other ways might the more generative qualities of refusal be explored, paying particular attention to the performative nature of refusal itself that may entrench as much as reverse power differentials in the 'field'. Drawing on decolonial and post-development epistemologies and diverse experiences as scholars situated and working across different geographies and disciplines, we explore the many entanglements, articulations, and enactments that remain ubiquitous in everyday ethnographic research praxis through several thematic angles. These include the negotiation of uneven (and often violent) forms of research collaboration and cooptation, the enactment of benevolent sexism as an 'ethics of care', and embodied practices such as silence(-ing), together with play and humour in participants' critiques of scientific truth-telling. While illustrating subtler manifestations of refusal across ethnographic research-based encounters, we also contemplate pedagogical practices of un/learning (to 'read') and to teach the arts of identifying and productively working with the many appearances of refusal - both manifest and less visible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: On 31 January 2020, the United Kingdom (UK) formally left the European Union (EU). Only a short transition period, until 31 December 2020, is available to negotiate collaborations for research in biomedical sciences and health care. Within the European scientific community, two opinions are common: 1) Brexit is an opportunity to obtain more funding at the expense of the departing British; and 2) UK colleagues should continue to collaborate in EU scientific efforts, including Horizon Europe and Erasmus+. To provide evidence for more informed negotiations, we sought to determine the contribution of the UK to EU's research in biomedical sciences. Methods: We performed a macro level scientometric analysis to estimate the contribution of the UK and EU member states, including those associated with EU-funding (EU+) namely Albania, Armenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Faroe Islands, Georgia, Iceland, Israel, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Norway, Serbia, Switzerland, Tunisia, Turkey, and Ukraine, to preclinical, clinical and health sciences. We searched the Web of Science database to count the total number of scientific publications and the top 1% most cited publications in the world between 2008 and 2017, calculated the performance efficiency by dividing the top 1% by the total number, and calculated the odds ratios to create a ranking of performance efficiency. We then compared the contribution of the UK to all the EU+ -based publications and the top 1% to the contributions of the ten EU member states with the largest biomedical research output and also compared the respective contributions to EU+ publications that resulted from collaborations with other regions in the world. Results: We found 2,991,016 biomedical publications from EU+ during 2008-2017, of which 19,019 (0.64%) were in the world's top 1% of the most cited publications. The UK produced 665,467 (22.3%) of these publications and had over two and a half times more top 1% most cited publications than the EU+ (odds ratio 2.79, 95% CI 2.71-2.88, p< 0.001). The UK's share in the EU+ co-publications with regions outside Europe ranged between 23.0% for the Arab League and 50.6% for Australia and New Zealand and its share of the top 1% ranged between 48.6% for the USA and Canada and 70.7% for the African Union. Conclusions: The UK contributed far more highly cited publications than the rest of the EU+ states and strongly contributed to European collaborations with the rest of the world during 2008-2017. This suggests that if the UK ceases to participate in EU scientific collaborations as a result of Brexit, the quantity and quality of EU's research in biomedical sciences will be adversely affected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A total of 1 917 publications of drinking water research in Africa from 1991 to 2013 were identified from the data hosted in online version of SCI-Expanded, Thomson Reuters Web of Science, for bibliometric analysis. The analysis included publication output, distribution of keywords, journals and subject areas, and performances of countries, institutions, and authors. Citation trends and highly-cited publications are also reported. We found that the publication output of related documents increased over the entire period of study. The results showed that 'water', 'drinking water', and 'oxidative stress' were the most frequent terms in publication titles, authors' keywords and KeyWords Plus. The top three subject areas were 'water resources', 'environmental science', and 'environmental and occupational public health'. The ten most productive institutions were located in South Africa and Egypt, and the University of Pretoria was the overall most productive institution. Thus, a quarter of all of the articles published were from South Africa. It was found that articles became increasingly collaborative with greater numbers of authors, page counts and bibliographies. More than half of the internationally collaborative articles were co-authored with researchers from Europe. French and US institutions contributed to the highest number of collaborative articles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Funding multi-institution centers of research excellence (CREs) has become a common means of supporting collaborative partnerships to address specific research topics. However, there is little guidance for those planning or managing a multi-institution CRE, which faces specific challenges not faced by single-institution research centers. We conducted qualitative research to identify the challenges faced by an Australian program of multiinstitution CREs with a view to identifying lessons for the future. This paper describes two of the most significant challenges: administrative complexity and investigator engagement. Administrative tasks (e.g.: establishing partner contracts and recruitment) were significantly more complex and time-consuming in the multi-institution CREs than single-institution research centers. Investigator engagement was hampered by a range of factors, including differing expectations within the investigator team and between the team and the funding body in relation to investigator roles as well as investigator capacity. We conclude with a discussion of key strategies that cut across the challenges: 1) early planning, 2) communication and 3) management capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]