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Shaping public research to enhance its societal contribution has become a key policy concern. Against this background, how research funding may stimulate the societal orientation of scientific research—or how funding is societally targeted—has been underexplored. This article proposes an exploratory approach to characterize societal targeting in individual researcher funding, based on four key societal targeting dimensions: interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity, prioritized research problems and user-oriented outputs. All these targeting dimensions of funding can potentially shape both researchers’ research networks and practices towards societal goals. These dimensions can be identified in context by studying ex ante specifications of funding instruments, i.e. rules and conditions for funding provision to researchers. We illustrate the dimensions in various degrees using two real cases of national public research funding. This systematic perspective on funding instrument characteristics then can potentially improve research evaluation, by allowing assessment in more detail of which funding dimensions associate with particular kinds of research ultimately being undertaken.

Extended abstract presented at the CRIS2022 conference in Dubrovnik.-- Event programme available at https://cris2022.srce.hr/#section-program 30 slides.-- Presentation delivered within the session "In-person presentations" on Sat May 14th The Spanish regulatory framework governing university doctoral studies, establishes that, for all purposes, PhD students are researchers in training and, as such, all the activities carried out by these students during their training as doctors, must be recorded. These activities must be detailed in a formal "doctoral activity document" (DAD) that serves to evaluate the student.

This deliverable presents a Digital tool which acts as a self-assessment resource for monitoring and assessing R&I Impact. The Deliverable describes the process leading to the design and development of the Toolkit including the definition of the scope and content and intended use. The ENLIGHT toolkit for the self-assessment of research impact awareness, literacy and readiness is a self-reflection tool designed for universities who wish to explore at an institutional level their research impact potential. The toolkit guides users through focus areas considered as relevant for universities to be research impact-driven. The web-based tool is available at this link Self-Assessment | ENLIGHT (enlight-eu.org)

This deliverable presents a Digital tool which acts as a self-assessment resource for monitoring and assessing R&I Impact. The Deliverable describes the process leading to the design and development of the Toolkit including the definition of the scope and content and intended use. The ENLIGHT toolkit for the self-assessment of research impact awareness, literacy and readiness is a self-reflection tool designed for universities who wish to explore at an institutional level their research impact potential. The toolkit guides users through focus areas considered as relevant for universities to be research impact-driven. The web-based tool is available at this link Self-Assessment | ENLIGHT (enlight-eu.org)

Purpose – Several frameworks have been developed to map and document scientific societal interaction and impact, each reflecting the specific forms of impact and interaction that characterize different academic fields. The ReAct taxonomy was developed to register data about “productive interactions” and provide an overview of research activities within the social sciences and humanities (SSH). The purpose of the present research is to examine whether the SSH-oriented taxonomy is relevant to the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines when clarifying societal interactions and impact, and whether the taxonomy adds value to the traditional STEM impact indicators such as citation scores and H-index. Design/methodology/approach – The research question was investigated through qualitative interviews with nine STEM researchers. During the interviews, the ReAct taxonomy and visual research profiles based on the ReAct categories were used to encourage and ensure in-depth discussions. The visual research profiles were based on publicly available material on the research activities of the interviewees. Findings – The study provided an insight into how STEM researchers assessed the importance of mapping societal interactions as a background for describing research impact, including which indicators are useful for expressing societal relevance and impact. With regard to the differences between STEM and SSH, the study identified a high degree of cohesion and uniformity in the importance of indicators. Differences were more closely related to the purpose of mapping and impact assessment than between scientific fields. The importance of amalgamation and synergy between academic and societal activities was also emphasised and clarified.Practical implications – The findings highlight the importance of mapping societal activities and impact, and that societal indicators should be seen as inspiring guidelines depending on purpose and use. A significant contribution is the identification of both uniformity and diversity between the main fields of SSH and STEM, as well as the connection between the choice of indicators and the purpose of mapping, e.g., for impact measurement, profiling, or career development.Originality/value – The work sheds light on STEM researchers’ views on research mapping, visualisation, and impact assessment, including similarities and differences between STEM and SSH research. Purpose: Several frameworks have been developed to map and document scientific societal interaction and impact, each reflecting the specific forms of impact and interaction that characterize different academic fields. The ReAct taxonomy was developed to register data about “productive interactions” and provide an overview of research activities within the social sciences and humanities (SSH). The purpose of the present research is to examine whether the SSH-oriented taxonomy is relevant to the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines when clarifying societal interactions and impact, and whether the taxonomy adds value to the traditional STEM impact indicators such as citation scores and H-index. Design/methodology/approach: The research question was investigated through qualitative interviews with nine STEM researchers. During the interviews, the ReAct taxonomy and visual research profiles based on the ReAct categories were used to encourage and ensure in-depth discussions. The visual research profiles were based on publicly available material on the research activities of the interviewees. Findings: The study provided an insight into how STEM researchers assessed the importance of mapping societal interactions as a background for describing research impact, including which indicators are useful for expressing societal relevance and impact. With regard to the differences between STEM and SSH, the study identified a high degree of cohesion and uniformity in the importance of indicators. Differences were more closely related to the purpose of mapping and impact assessment than between scientific fields. The importance of amalgamation and synergy between academic and societal activities was also emphasised and clarified. Practical implications: The findings highlight the importance of mapping societal activities and impact, and that societal indicators should be seen as inspiring guidelines depending on purpose and use. A significant contribution is the identification of both uniformity and diversity between the main fields of SSH and STEM, as well as the connection between the choice of indicators and the purpose of mapping, e.g. for impact measurement, profiling, or career development. Originality/value: The work sheds light on STEM researchers' views on research mapping, visualisation and impact assessment, including similarities and differences between STEM and SSH research.

This presentation is from the CIVICA Research Open Science for the Social Sciences workshop on Introduction to Open Access, Open Data and Research Impact.This workshop covered the basics of open access and open data. Participants learnthow open research can have a positive effect on the impact their research makes on the world.

Presentation made at Cladea 2022

We study how data visualizations affect the perception of research. Data visuals, like tables and figures, are paramount in research but their frequency and nature vary across disciplines and across journals within disciplines. There is only limited evidence available on how data visualizations affect the perception of scientific evidence. We try to fill this void by providing descriptive as well as experimental insights on this topic. This repository contains information on the design and setup of the experimental part. In our experiment, we plan to investigate how participants perceive the results of a fictive study based on different visual information. We randomize participants into five treatment groups. One group, the baseline, only receives information on the main findings of the fictive experiment as text. A second group receives the textual information with a table summarizing the main findings of the fictive experiment. Groups three to five receive the textual information with a graph summarizing the main findings of the fictive experiment. Across the groups receiving a graphical treatment, we gradually increase the details of information on the underlying data distribution displayed in the graph. At the same time, we provide the same and necessary key statistics of the results to each of the five treatment groups. Hence, we only vary how transparent a visual (table or graph) is about the underlying data distribution. We hypothesize that more visual information will result in (a) a higher perceived internal validity and (b) a more favorably perception of visuals. For (a), we expect participants to evaluate internal validity as being higher, if (i) presented with a visual (relative to baseline), (ii) presented with a graph (relative to table) and (iii) presented with a more data-transparent graph (relative to less data-transparent graph). For (b), we let participants evaluate the visuals they receive as a treatment along four dimension (clarity, complexity, flexibility, and interpretability) to test for the perception of visuals between-subject. We exploit our baseline group, after they took part in the experiment, and let them evaluate all four visuals (one table, three graphs) jointly to test for the perception of visuals within-subjects.

DESIGN: Qualitative interview study. AIMS: To explore research participants’ views on the impacts of research involvement, specifically for research that has been led by healthcare professionals outside medicine. ANALYSIS METHOD: Framework analysis. POPULATION: Current and previous research participants/patient research advisory group members who are/have been involved in research led by healthcare professionals outside medicine. ELIGIBILITY: Research involvement in past 3 years. DURATION: 16 months. FUNDER: Imperial Health Charity and NIHR Imperial Biomedical Research Centre SPONSOR: Imperial College London ETHICS APPROVAL: REC 21/WA/0229, IRAS 298078 - National Health Service Research Ethics Committee

The aims of this study are to explore individuals’ experiences of being involved in healthcare research and to identify the types of impacts that are important for participants or patient and public advisors. Specifically, research led by NMAHPP clinicians (Nursing, Midwifery, Allied health professions, Healthcare science, Psychology and Pharmacy).

Bringing new cancer therapies into routine cancer care is a long and complex process. Phase 1 clinical trials assess new cancer treatments in people for the first time. It is a critical step in the pathway. The aim of this project is to make the world of a cancer Phase 1 trialist and the value they bring, understandable to others. From those interested in careers in cancer clinical trials to stakeholders and partners seeking to innovate across the cancer control continuum, through a deeper understanding and insight of those involved.

In this paper, we conduct a bibliometric analysis of the global research related to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the United Nations sustainability agenda. Our analysis builds upon the Elsevier Scopus-indexed scientific outputs since all those are classified for SDG relationships at indexing. We follow the recently published research protocol and use the Elsevier Scopus engine and the SciVal bibliometric reporting and benchmarking tool to analyze the productivity and impact of the global SDG-related research in the 2017–2022 period. We report on the most influential authors and publication outlets for SDG-related research, focusing on the collaboration patterns and their relationship to research productivity and impact. We also use keyword analysis and science mapping to describe the intellectual structure of the SDG research and its implications, which could be interpreted in terms of the “bandwagon effect”.

In recent years, the academic world has been increasingly concerned with the social benefits of research and how they can be identified and demonstrated. Various discussions are being held on the impact of research, which are especially controversial in those countries where impact has become an important factor in the distribution of research funding. For participatory health research, a form of research that prioritises the engagement of those whose work or lives are the topic of the research, achieving social just impact outside the academic world is fundamental to its goal to reduce health inequalities.This article explores the questions of how research impact can be understood and collected and whether the impact of participatory health research can contribute to equal health opportunities. It addresses aspects of impact discussions in the United Kingdom and Germany exemplarily and presents the current state of the professional debate on the topic. Finally, it describes the drivers of participatory health research that can lead to a strengthening of equal health opportunities.The discussion of research impact allows for assessing and strengthening the sustainability and value of research, not only in the field of participatory health research. The diverse impacts of participatory health research have, however, the potential to reduce health inequalities and need to be recognised as such.Seit einigen Jahren beschäftigt sich die akademische Welt verstärkt damit, welcher gesellschaftliche Nutzen von Forschung ausgeht und wie er erhoben und dargestellt werden kann. Zu der Wirkung von Forschung, dem sogenannten Forschungsimpact, werden verschiedene Diskussionen geführt – kontrovers besonders in Ländern, in denen Impact mittlerweile ein Faktor bei der Verteilung von Fördergeldern geworden ist. Partizipative Gesundheitsforschung ist ein Forschungsansatz, der diejenige in die Forschung einbindet, deren Arbeit oder Leben im Forschungsinteresse stehen. Mit diesem Ansatz soll auch außerhalb der akademischen Welt Wirkung erzielt werden, um Veränderungen zum gesundheitlichen Wohlergehen anzustoßen und die gesundheitliche Chancengleichheit in der Gesellschaft zu erhöhen.Der Beitrag geht den Fragen nach, wie Forschungsimpact verstanden und erhoben werden kann und welchen Beitrag die Wirkungen der partizipativen Gesundheitsforschung zu gesundheitlicher Chancengleichheit leisten können. Er geht exemplarisch auf Aspekte von Impactdiskussionen im Vereinigten Königreich und in Deutschland ein und bildet dann den aktuellen Stand der fachlichen Auseinandersetzung mit dem Themenbereich ab. Schließlich beschreibt er die Wirkfaktoren der partizipativen Gesundheitsforschung, die zu einer Stärkung gesundheitlicher Chancengleichheit führen können.Nicht nur im Bereich der partizipativen Gesundheitsforschung ermöglicht es die Diskussion über Forschungsimpact, die Nachhaltigkeit und den Wert von Forschung zu bewerten und zu stärken. Da die vielseitigen Wirkungen der partizipativen Gesundheitsforschung jedoch das Potenzial haben, gesundheitliche Ungleichheiten zu verringern, sollten sie entsprechend wahrgenommen und anerkannt werden.

Bibliometrics, via the exploitation of large-scale publication data, is a facile approach to explore gender-related trends, especially gender equality in academic publishing and authorship. For the first time, this study aims to investigate the gender-related trends in anti-doping sciences to (1) explore the relational structure of gender aspects of authorial, topical, and methodological features, (2) give recognition to women's contribution to anti-doping research, and (3) identify unique "gendered" potentials for advancing anti-doping research. To deliver on these aims, we employed bibliometric tools to publication records in anti-doping. After constructing a database containing academic publications on any aspect of anti-doping with at least one woman among the authors, we applied state-of-the-art methods from bibliometric science mapping and network analysis. The Lotka distribution model showed that the anti-doping research is a closed community with only 70 authors appearing more than once. Male authors being the majority (66.2%), women are under-represented in this field. The most important authorship position in the academic articles is mainly occupied by men, publications with male corresponding authors were in 774 out of 991 anti-doping related papers. The close connection of the top twenty most influential authors, men and women, to the World Anti-Doping Agency in some professional capacity suggest that the Agency have an influence on the anti-doping research beyond directly providing funding. In terms of geographical regions, publications with female authors were dominated anti-doping research in Italy, Romania, and Spain. In research networks to date, women have outperformed male authors in information centrality, which means that women in anti-doping research have had higher level of control over the information flow in the field than their male counterparts. The results of this study confirm the potential of bibliometric approach in the identification of emerging research topics and quantifying gender differentiation in the field of anti-doping. Due to their higher information centrality, women are better positioned for problem-focused multidisciplinary research both within anti-doping community, and with researchers in cognate fields. Bibliometric analyses have proved to be a powerful tool for monitoring and advancing anti-doping research impact via identifying new avenues for multidisciplinary work, better gender representation, and diversity. ispartof: FRONTIERS IN SPORTS AND ACTIVE LIVING vol:4 ispartof: location:Switzerland status: published

Academic Health Centers (AHCs) have an enormous impact on health, society, and national competitiveness. They have a threefold strategic mission and heterogeneous models of governance. Our aim is to investigate how different AHC configurations are associated with research performance. The method we adopted follows two steps. First, we identify organizational configurations through cluster analysis of nine variables. Second, we correlate these configurations to bibliometric measures of research outputs. Findings show that AHCs, that are specialty-focused and not mainly involved in educational activities are more productive and have more research impact than fully integrated and affiliated AHCs. Those AHCs also share secondary contextual features.

Librarians sure do love their toolkits—but what happens when the tools we use reinforce systems of discrimination and exclusion? The Research Impact Fluxkit is a playful and interactive interpretation of the library toolkit intended to spark discussion about how we assess the impact of our research.

This paper proposes that the United Nation's sustainable development goals (SDGs) and associated targets form an effective framework for determining real-world research impact. Existing bibliometrics that assess the quality of academic work are usually quantitative and self-referential, reducing the focus on real-world issues. The same measurements are often adopted by funding bodies, pressuring researchers to increase compliance, and further reducing integrity and real-world impact. A series of world cafés were conducted, collecting data on how researchers, their institutions, and network organisations can contribute to, and measure research aligned with the SDGs and targets. The results showed that participants were generally positive towards using the SDGs and targets to measure impact and quality of academic research. Suggestions to assist greater adoption of the SDGs and targets as a measure of impact included: aligning governmental and institutional funding; changing key performance indicators; increasing cross-disciplinary work; aligning mission/vision statements; and legitimising SDG-focused projects at conferences.

Objectives: Social media (SoMe) is globally prevalent, but its relevance for disseminating sensitive topics, such as violence victimization and mental health among adolescents and emerging adults, remain under-researched. Youth-dominate platforms may be well-suited for resilience messaging on safety, health, and well-being, and exploratory knowledge mobilization research. Research from a common team funding source supported a secondary objective that thematically linked research could be used to impact dissemination. Methods: This experiment utilized an ABA design, with a two-week baseline, followed by SoMe posting on weeks "A" and no posting on weeks "B" from a single Instagram account. During posting weeks, image-based messages from nine open access articles, from a risk and resilience research team, were posted three times per day. Each post contained a link to the associated open-access research article. Outcome dissemination indices, collected weekly, were reads of the referenced articles on a research-based networking site, ResearchGate. Results: Instagram indices formed the basis of our manipulation check. Relative to periods of inactivity, periods of active Instagram engagement led to significant increases in the number of Instagram impressions, website clicks, and followers, and in the number of reads of the posted ResearchGate articles. Implications: As the first study to examine Instagram impact for risk and resilience research, these findings encourage further SoMe work in this area of high public health import.

In this paper, we consider the intensifying pressures on critical research and academic integrity in a research policy context that has come to be increasingly dominated by an instrumentalist mind-set. Using sensitising resources drawn from Geoff Whitty’s critique of the ‘what works’ agenda, we reflect on the current conditions of academic labour and some of the key issues and dilemmas they pose for critical researchers in the sociology of education and beyond. In particular, we underline the trend for ‘what works’ agendas to become constitutive of academic identities and practices, including at micro-levels, such that the option of ‘standing outside’ them is shifting from being merely personally taxing to being institutionally disallowed. In addition to highlighting the dilemmas this creates for critical researchers and the threat this poses to expansive and democratic approaches to education, the paper emphasises the centrality of relationship-forming in understanding and underpinning academic integrity.

Purpose This paper aims to argue that engagement with industry in research, while costly in terms of time and effort, can provide benefits in terms of measurable research impact, particularly in the business-to-business (B2B) domain. Design/methodology/approach This study draws joint experiences about how best to connect with an industry organization, how to engage with that organization and how to provide and document impact by transforming some aspect of that organization. Findings The findings of this study provide practical and implementable suggestions on how to engage in impactful B2B research. Originality/value This study discusses the special nature of the B2B domain and why engagement with industry is especially important and beneficial. Though such research may not be appropriate for all academics, this study argues that its high rewards more than compensate for its high costs.

This paper uses discourse theory to obtain a broader understanding of how research impact of sustainable tourism research develops in the environmental policy domain. Discourse theory shifts emphasis from the substance of science versus policy to the use of science in policy processes and explains the political dimensions of policymaking. We first review a well-documented science-policy gap in sustainable tourism research on climate change to develop an alternative conceptualisation of research impact. Then, using a case study approach, we investigate this framework by evaluating the impact of a PhD thesis about aviation’s global CO 2 emissions on the Dutch aviation policy process. The case study shows research impact is entwined with various other elements, and embedded in a specific governance context. Research influenced contrasting science-policy interactions and contributed to conflicting policy actions and reactions. The impact of research in this case was manifested through the formation and interplay of multiple knowledge objects that were both embraced and marginalised. In settings like this, research is used to legitimise pre-existing policy positions rather than to develop new policies. We discuss the implications of narrow conceptions of research impact. The paper highlights the need for advanced policy analysis in sustainable tourism research.

The journal Scientometrics recently featured a study on the citation impact of video abstracts and subsequent debate on the actual scope of the same impact. As things stand, the crucial issue of that debate lies in the motivations behind the authors’ choice to equip (some of) their articles with video abstracts. It can be easily understood that those motivations are hardly observable, and it is indeed agreed that observational limitations make them difficult to unravel. Nonetheless, the debate has seen the emergence of two different positions. The first may be summarized as follows: ask the authors to speak out about their motivations and rely on the elicited answers. The second bases itself on the opposite cornerstone: let the data tell the story about authors’ motivations. This recalls the distinction between stated preferences and revealed preferences. Here I develop some arguments in favor of the latter approach as far as the analysis of new media’s citation impact is concerned.

With the shift in their social roles, modern zoos and aquariums are required to develop scientific research. Although zoos and aquariums worldwide have reported an increase in the number of papers they publish and the diversification of their fields in recent decades, the specific circumstances in Japan are slightly unclear. We listed peer-reviewed papers authored by Japanese zoos and aquariums using search engines and quantitatively evaluated the changes in the number of papers published over 62 years. Our results showed that papers published in Japan have increased remarkably since the 1990s, and research fields have diversified as in the rest of the world. In particular, joint research with research institutes has seen an upward trend, and the instances of English-language papers have increased. Meanwhile, the content of the research was biased. In zoos, research on animal welfare has been increasing, but the focus was heavily biased toward captive mammals. Aquariums contributed to the understanding of local ecosystems through the fundamental study of wildlife, but there were fewer papers on improving husbandry. Our results indicated that while research by Japanese zoos and aquariums is developing, research on welfare, conservation, and education regarding native endangered species must still be improved.

The pursuit of greater research ‘impact’ has become embedded within Higher Education, through links to perceived value for money, and reified through institutional auditing processes. Academics are frequently encouraged to use social media as a means to facilitate public engagement and enhance research impact, as it offers the potential to connect with more diverse, non-academic audiences, and may lead to practical application of research findings. However, while social media training sessions are now common for academics and doctoral students, little is known about the relationship between use of social media and academics’ own perceptions of research impact and public engagement in practice. In this paper, findings are presented from text responses within a survey of academics (n=107) exploring examples of what they consider to be indicative of research impact through social media. This includes what academics perceive to be examples of high-impact interactions through social media, and how this is mediated by different platforms. The findings have practical implications for social media training for academics, and also suggest that institutional definitions of research impact may not account for the range of scholarly engagement social media platforms can facilitate.

In this paper we seek to realise the potential that Spaapen and van Drooge’s productive interactions concept offers, but which we argue has been lost through its operationalisation as a process of ‘counting interactions’. Productive interactions arise through moments of contact between two very different systems (the societal and the scientific), and each system values societal impact in very different ways. Finding mutual value in that interaction is important, and we argue that value in both arises when network arrangements shift, as academic disciplines solve urgent scientific problems and as societies improve living conditions. Productive interactions approach assumes the value-frameworks of the wider networks within which particular knowledge sets become actionable. However, our constructive critique highlights the omission of the wider elements of science and social systems within which productive interactions takes place (and whose dynamics ultimately determine the final scientific and societal impact of that research). Indeed, research evaluation to date has not considered the consequences of the productive interactions in terms of these changing relationships. To contribute to this lacuna, we propose a model that conceptualises a meso-level system comprising interactions between actors within two subsystems, highlighting the importance of coupling between researchers and users, valuation signals given to particular productive interactions from researcher and societal communities and the way these signals in turn embed useful knowledge practices. We apply it to a set of examples of productive interactions in the field of social sciences and humanities (SSH) gathered in the framework of a European project., This paper draws upon research funded through a variety of sources including HERAVALUE, SIAMPI, Conselleria d’Educació, Investigació, Cultura i Esport and ENRESSH. This paper is based on research conducted under the HERA Value project, which was originally financially supported by the HERA Joint Research Programme (http://heranet.info) which was co-funded by AHRC, AKA, DASTI, ETF, FNR, FWF, HAZU, IRC, MHEST, NWO, RANNIS, RCN, VR and The European Community FP7 2007-2013, under the Socio-economic Sciences and Humanities programme. This paper is also based upon work from COST Action CA15137 ENRESSH, supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology)”. This also draws upon the conceptual work conducted in the framework of the project supported by Conselleria d’Educació, Investigació, Cultura i Esport (GV/2018/008), as well as SIAMPI (Social Impact Assessment Methods for research and funding instruments through the study of Productive Interactions between science and society) supported by the European Commission 7th Framework Programme. The work was further supported by the Academy of Finland (Muhonen 2018–317702) and NOS-HS (Benneworth 2018–00051/NOS-HS).

This article seeks to identify criteria and indicators for scientific evaluation that will improve the way in which funding agencies, academic institutions and other groups evaluate the quality and impact of research. To do this, a bibliographic review is carried out, based on articles about scientific research evaluation policies and international agendas implemented in the last years (mainly in the United Kingdom, United States, Australia, China and Latin America). The results indicate that there is no single method of scientific evaluation, since no indicator is absolute. Each research has different actors that must be considered and the research must be valued in its context. A mixed evaluation system is recommended, which incorporates quantitative and qualitative criteria, but recognizes the limits and scope of both and also of each discipline. Este artículo busca identificar criterios e indicadores de evaluación científica, que permitan mejorar la forma en que las agencias de financiación, las instituciones académicas y otros grupos evalúan la calidad e impacto de la investigación. Para ello, se realiza una revisión bibliográfica, basada en artículos sobre políticas de evaluación de la investigación científica y agendas internacionales implementadas en los últimos años (principalmente en el Reino Unido, Estados Unidos, Australia, China y Latinoamérica). Los resultados indican que no existe un solo método de evaluación científica, ya que ningún indicador es absoluto. Cada investigación posee actores distintos que deben ser considerados y se debe valorar la investigación en su contexto. Se recomienda un sistema de evaluación mixto, que incorpore criterios cuantitativos y cualitativos, pero que reconozca los límites y alcances de ambos y también de cada disciplina.

To better address twenty-first-century challenges, research institutions often develop and publish research impact strategies, but as a tool, impact strategies are poorly understood. This study provides the first formal analysis of impact strategies from the UK, Canada, Australia, Denmark, New Zealand and Hong Kong, China, and from independent research institutes. Two types of strategy emerged. First, ‘achieving impact’ strategies tended to be bottom-up and co-productive, with a strong emphasis on partnerships and engagement, but they were more likely to target specific beneficiaries with structured implementation plans, use boundary organisations to co-produce research and impact, and recognise impact with less reliance on extrinsic incentives. Second, ‘enabling impact’ strategies were more top-down and incentive-driven, developed to build impact capacity and culture across an institution, faculty or centre, with a strong focus on partnerships and engagement, and they invested in dedicated impact teams and academic impact roles, supported by extrinsic incentives including promotion criteria. This typology offers a new way to categorise, analyse and understand research impact strategies, alongside insights that may be used by practitioners to guide the design of future strategies, considering the limitations of top-down, incentive-driven approaches versus more bottom-up, co-productive approaches.

This paper focuses on ‘talking’ methods, noting their wide application across the social sciences, and identifies potential spaces for innovation in this field. Drawing on interview material from the Methods for Change project, we argue that researching methods requires creative approaches to talk. With research methods as our focus, we draw on data collected from online interviews with 36 academics, which aimed to explore the transformative potential of social science research methods. We make three contributions: first, we consider challenges and potentials for talking about methods and communicating the transformative potential of social science methods to diverse audiences. Second, we elaborate on the detail of doing talking methods, identifying potential spaces for innovation. Third, we suggest there is value in supplementing interviews with creative techniques when talking with and about method. We highlight three such techniques used in our project as a means of eliciting conversation about the transformative potential of methods: i) how-to instructions; ii) object interviewing; and iii) methods as animals. The conceptual underpinnings, practical applications and obstacles encountered with each technique are discussed, including our own reflections on creative interviewing in a context where face-to-face research was restricted. In doing so, we respond to and advance recent debates about the need to talk more about the doing of talking methods. We argue that academics need to articulate why methods matter in creating change to global challenges, and that creative techniques can play a pivotal role.

First edition of this book here: http://doi.org/10.31885/9789515149916 This book is a practical guide for researchers and PhD students on the topic of ‘impact’. Nowadays many funding bodies expect applicants to compose an ‘impact section’ in research funding applications, and this guide focuses on providing concrete tips and tools for proposal writing. The book is not intended to be an academic exploration into the concept, but the guidance provided here is based on author’s own experiences of writing winning proposals. The guiding principle for the author is to provide the best possible insights for researchers in order to write better proposals and have even more impactful research. Second corrected edition

We study how data visualizations affect the perception of research. Data visuals, like tables and figures, are paramount in research but their frequency and nature vary across disciplines and across journals within disciplines. There is only limited evidence available on how data visualizations affect the perception of scientific evidence. We try to contribute by providing descriptive as well as experimental insights on this topic. This repository contains information on the design and setup of the experimental part. In our 5x1 between-subjects experiment, we plan to investigate how participants perceive the results of a fictive experiment based on different data visuals. The experiment has one baseline and four treatments. The baseline presents the findings of the fictive experiment verbally. The four treatments comprise a presentation as table format and three graphs. Across the three graphs, we gradually increase how transparent the graph shows the underlying data distribution. We keep all other information constant, i.e., a description of the fictive experiment, descriptive statistics and a summary of the findings, presenting participants across all five groups with the same key statistics on the findings of the fictive experiment. Participants must answer two sets of questions. For the first, participants must rank the (perceived) internal validity of the fictive experiment. For the second, participants evaluate their perception of the presented visual along four dimensions (table and graph groups only). The four dimensions are clarity/efficiency, complexity, interpretability/pre-knowledge, and flexibility. We collect supplemental data on the evaluation of visuals with a build-in within-subjects design. After they completed the main part of the experiment, we let baseline participants evaluate all four treatment visuals jointly.

Availability of data and materials: Not applicable for this opinion paper. Copyriight © The Author(s) 2022. WHO promotes the use of research in policy-making to drive improvements in health, including in achieving Sustainable Development Goals such as tobacco control. The European Union’s new €95 billion Horizon Europe research framework programme parallels these aims, and also includes commitments to fund economic evaluations. However, researchers often express frustration at the perceived lack of attention to scientific evidence during policy-making. For example, some researchers claim that evidence regarding the return on investment from optimal implementation of evidence-based policies is frequently overlooked. An increasingly large body of literature acknowledges inevitable barriers to research use, but also analyses facilitators encouraging such use. This opinion piece describes how some research is integrated into policy-making. It highlights two recent reviews. One examines impact assessments of 36 multi-project research programmes and identifies three characteristics of projects more likely to influence policy-making. These include a focus on healthcare system needs, engagement of stakeholders, and research conducted for organizations supported by structures to receive and use evidence. The second review suggests that such characteristics are likely to occur as part of a comprehensive national health research system strategy, especially one integrated into the healthcare system. We also describe two policy-informing economic evaluations conducted in Spain. These examined the most cost-effective package of evidence-based tobacco control interventions and the cost-effectiveness of different strategies to increase screening coverage for cervical cancer. Both projects focused on issues of healthcare concern and involved considerable stakeholder engagement. The Spanish examples reinforce some lessons from the global literature and, therefore, could help demonstrate to authorities in Spain the value of developing comprehensive health research systems, possibly following the interfaces and receptor model. The aim of this would be to integrate needs assessment and stakeholder engagement with structures spanning the research and health systems. In such structures, economic evaluation evidence could be collated, analysed by experts in relation to healthcare needs, and fed into both policy-making as appropriate, and future research calls. The increasingly large local and global evidence base on research utilization could inform detailed implementation of this approach once accepted as politically desirable. Given the COVID-19 pandemic, increasing the cost-effectiveness of healthcare systems and return on investment of public health interventions becomes even more important.

Forage grasses and legumes are the principal source of nutrition for most ruminant livestock in developing countries. Raising yields of forage crops can increase the availability and affordability of livestock products as well as reduce pressure on increasingly scarce land resources by enabling greater herd densities on existing pasture. However, the economic significance of cultivated forage crops in developing countries is not well-understood. We provide estimates of the present area and production value of cultivated forage crops as well as review evidence on the extent of adoption of CGIAR-derived improved varieties of cultivated forage species and their economic impact in developing countries. There are at least 159 million hectares under cultivated forage crops producing yield worth around $63 billion per year (at 2014-2016 prices). Latin America accounts for about 85% of this forage crop area. CGIAR forage breeding programs have developed and helped disseminate improved varieties of Brachiaria, Stylosanthes, Vigna unguiculata, and Calliandra spp., which by 2015 had been adopted on over 12 million hectares producing economic benefits of over $5.8 billion/year.

In February 2021, University of California (UC) Libraries co-hosted UC Love Data Week, a series of free events for UC affiliates on a wide range of topics including: data publishing, data repositories, data cleaning, and text mining to name a few. In an interactive workshop entitled, "Ethical Considerations in Data", data librarians from UCLA, UC Berkeley, and UC San Diego hosted an open discussion around data ethics focusing on case studies of participant data privacy, algorithmic bias, and the social justice components of research. The discussion includes an overview of related resources available at various UC campuses, including further reading available through the libraries and groups on UC campus conducting research in these areas.

Background: Earth sciences is one of those sensitive field sciences that are closely needed to solve local problems within local physical and social settings. Earth researchers find state-of-the-art of topics in earth sciences by using scientific databases, conduct research on the topics, and write about them. However, the accessibility, readability, and usability of those articles for local communities are major problems in measuring the impact of research, although it may be covered by well-known international scientific databases. Objectives: To ascertain empirically whether there are differences in document distribution, in the proportions of openly accessible documents, and in the geographical coverage of earth sciences topics as revealed through analyses of documents retrieved from scientific databases and to propose new measures for assessing the impact of research in earth sciences based on those differences. Methods: Relevant documents were retrieved using ‘earth sciences’ as a search term in English and other languages from ten databases of scientific publications. The results of these searches were analysed using frequency analysis and a quantitative- descriptive design. Results: (1) The number of articles in English from international databases exceeded the number of articles in native languages from national-level databases. (2) The number of open-access (OA) articles in the national databases was higher than that in other databases. (3) The geographical coverage of earth science papers was uneven between countries when the number of documents retrieved from closed-access commercial databases was compared to that from the other databases. (4) The regulations in Indonesia related to promotion of lecturers assign greater weighting to publications indexed in Scopus and the Web of Science (WoS) and publications in journals with impact factors are assigned a higher weighting. Conclusions: The dominance of scientific articles in English as well as the paucity of OA publications indexed in international databases (compared to those in national or regional databases) may have been due to the greater weighting assigned to such publications. Consequently, the relevance of research reported in those publications to local communities has been questioned. This article suggests some open-science practices to transform the current regulations related to promotion into a more responsible measurement of research performance and impact.

Stakeholder engagement in health policy research is often said to increase ‘research impact’, but the active role of stakeholders in creating impact remains underexplored. We explored how stakeholders shaped the translation of health policy research into action. Our comparative case-study tracked a European research project that aimed to transfer an existing tobacco control return on investment tool. That project also aimed to increase its impact by engaging with stakeholders in further developing the tool. We conducted semi-structured interviews, using an actor-scenario mapping approach. Actor-scenarios can be seen as relational descriptions of a future world. We mapped the scenarios by asking stakeholders to describe who and what would play a role in the tool’s utilisation. Our results show that stakeholders envisioned disparate futures for the tool. Some scenarios were specific, whereas most were generic projections of abstract potential users and responsibilities. We show how stakeholders mobilised elements of context, such as legislative support and agricultural practice, that would affect the tool’s use. We conclude that stakeholders shape knowledge translation processes by continuously putting forth explicit or implicit scenarios about the future. Mapping actor-scenarios may help in aligning knowledge production with utilisation. Insights into potential roles and responsibilities could be fed back in research projects with the aim of increasing the likelihood that the study results may be used. United Kingdom Medical Research Council

This study addressed the conceptualization of the societal impact of research from the perspective of programme evaluation, by focusing on the three ‘result’ elements of logic models: outputs, outcomes, and impact. In research evaluation, the distinction could resemble a difference between product, use, and benefit. The study established whether researchers in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), South Africa excluded, view societal impact as extending across all three elements or as confined to the last element only. A web survey of 485 SSA researchers was conducted, as researchers from this region are not yet bounded by policy definitions of impact. The survey imposed the three elements of logic models onto five hypothetical descriptions of ‘impactful’ research initiatives. Respondents rated each element in terms of how much it reflects the societal impact of research. For any initiative, use was more likely to be considered a strong example of societal impact compared to a product, but less likely so compared to benefit. Between 23% and 43% of respondents rated all three elements as strong examples of the societal impact of research. Responses were analyzed by SSA region and the research domain and years of research experience of survey participants. An open-ended question about own understandings of societal impact was included as well in the survey. The responses portrayed impact as a (generally) positive effect that contributes to change in the daily life of human kind. The expectation that research should have impact at an almost general level of aggregation could be unique to the SSA context.

Introduction It is often necessary to demonstrate the impact of a research program over time both within and beyond institutions. However, it is difficult to accurately track the publications of research groups over time without significant effort. A simple, scalable, and economical way to track publications from research groups and their metrics would address this challenge. Methods Google Scholar automatically tracks the scholarly output and citation counts of individual researchers. We created Google Scholar profiles to track the scholarly productivity of five research groups: an institutional educational research program, a division of emergency medicine, a department of emergency medicine, a national educational scholarship working group, and an international organization dedicated to online education. We added the publications of each group member to their respective group Google Scholar profile and a junior faculty member monitored the citations that were suggested. Results Google Scholar tracked a diverse collection of five research groups over 6–36 months. In addition to having different organizational structures and purposes, the groups varied in size, consisting of 8–60 researchers, and prolificacy, with group citation counts between 1006–58,380 and group h‑indexes ranging from 19–101. Discussion We anticipate that as this innovation becomes better known it will increasingly be adopted by traditional and non-traditional research groups to easily track their productivity and impact. Additional initiatives will be needed to standardize reporting guidelines within and between institutions. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1007/s40037-019-0515-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

peer-reviewed How research impact is defined and evaluated is much-debated at research policy level. Offering one avenue for capturing societal research impact, altmetrics are proposed as quantitative indicators providing a measure of the reach and attention that a research output, such as a peer-reviewed paper, is receiving online. Eighty publicly-funded food researchers participated in an online mixed-methods engagement study. The analytical framework of sensemaking was used to explore participants’ views of altmetrics as a threat or opportunity for their perceived professional identities. The identities important to our participants included ensuring rigour and quality in knowledge production; communicating and engaging with non-academic audiences; and bringing about tangible and meaningful changes in society. While an appetite for changes to research evaluation was apparent in our study, altmetrics was perceived to introduce a number of different threats as well as opportunities to the academic identity, which will influence its potential uptake and use. This study was funded through the CommBeBiz Project which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, Project No: 652707 under call H2020-ISIB-2014-1.

Background There are increasing opportunities for healthcare professionals outside medicine to be involved in and lead clinical research. However, there are few roles within these professions that include time for research. In order to develop such roles, and evaluate effective use of this time, the range of impacts of this clinical academic activity need to be valued and understood by healthcare leaders and managers. To date, these impacts have not been comprehensively explored, but are suggested to extend beyond traditional quantitative impact metrics, such as publications, citations and funding awards. Methods Ten databases, four grey literature repositories and a naïve web search engine were systematically searched for articles reporting impacts of clinical academic activity by healthcare professionals outside medicine. Specifically, this did not include the direct impacts of the research findings, rather the impacts of the research activity. All stages of the review were performed by a minimum of two reviewers and reported impacts were categorised qualitatively according to a modified VICTOR (making Visible the ImpaCT Of Research) framework. Results Of the initial 2704 identified articles, 20 were eligible for inclusion. Identified impacts were mapped to seven themes: impacts for patients; impacts for the service provision and workforce; impacts to research profile, culture and capacity; economic impacts; impacts on staff recruitment and retention; impacts to knowledge exchange; and impacts to the clinical academic. Conclusions Several overlapping sub-themes were identified across the main themes. These included the challenges and benefits of balancing clinical and academic roles, the creation and implementation of new evidence, and the development of collaborations and networks. These may be key areas for organisations to explore when looking to support and increase academic activity among healthcare professionals outside medicine. The modified VICTOR tool is a useful starting point for individuals and organisations to record the impact of their research activity. Further work is needed to explore standardised methods of capturing research impact that address the full range of impacts identified in this systematic review and are specific to the context of clinical academics outside medicine.

Introduction: There are no studies that specifically compare research output of Palearctic and Neotropical mammalogy; such comparison would be useful for informed decisions in conservation and management. Objective: To compare the scientific documents and citations about Palearctic and Neotropical mammals over half a century. Methods: We compared 50 years (1970-2019) of documents on 60 medium and large-sized (heavier than 1 kg) mammal species, in Scopus and the Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection, considering number of documents and four citation indicators at the species level (h-index, citation rate, total citations, and citations per year). Results: We retrieved 13 274 documents in Scopus and 12 913 in WoS. We found that Palearctic mammals have 3.77 times more documents than Neotropical species in Scopus (3.91 times in WoS), and that the documents recorded 5.95 more total citations in Scopus (6.93 times more in WoS). Palearctic documents also record more yearly citations and a higher h-index in both Scopus and WoS. Scopus retrieved more articles for Neotropical species (2 782 vs. 2 631 in WoS) and had more citations (28 120 vs. 24 977 in WoS); differences for the citation indicators between regions were marker in WoS. The h-index and total citations are greatly affected by how many studies are published, i.e. the region with more production is the one with higher values. The Neotropical articles showed a greater growth rate in the last decade, decreasing the gap between both regions. Conclusion: There is a regional bias in WoS and Scopus, which retrieve more articles and citations about Palearctic mammals than about Neotropical mammals; this bias is worse in WoS and means that an urgent increase in indexed research about Neotropical species is needed to be on par with Palearctic research. Resumen Introducción: No existen estudios que comparen, específicamente, la investigación de la mastozoología paleártica con la neotropical; pero tales comparaciones serían útiles para tomar decisiones informadas en conservación y manejo. Objetivo: Comparar los documentos científicos sobre mamíferos paleárticos y neotropicales, y su impacto en citas, durante medio siglo. Métodos: Comparamos 50 años (1970-2019) de documentos sobre 60 especies de mamíferos de tamaño mediano y grande (más de 1 kg), en Scopus y la colección principal del Web of Science (WoS), considerando el número de documentos y cuatro indicadores de citas a nivel de especie (índice h, tasa de citas, total de citas y citas por año). Resultados: Recuperamos 13 274 documentos en Scopus y 12 913 en WoS, y encontramos que los mamíferos paleárticos tienen 3.77 veces más documentos que las especies neotropicales en Scopus (3.91 veces en WoS), y que los documentos registran 5.95 más citas totales en Scopus (6.93 veces más en WoS). Los documentos paleárticos también registran más citas anuales y un índice h más alto, tanto en Scopus como en WoS. Scopus recuperó más artículos para especies neotropicales (2 782 vs. 2 631 en WoS) y tuvo más citas (28 120 vs. 24 977 en WoS). Las diferencias para los indicadores de citas entre regiones fueron más marcadas en WoS. El índice h y el total de citas se ven muy afectados por la cantidad de estudios publicados, es decir, la región con más producción será la que tenga indicadores más altos. Los artículos neotropicales mostraron una mayor tasa de crecimiento en la última década, disminuyendo la brecha entre ambas regiones. Conclusión: Existe un sesgo regional en WoS y Scopus, que recuperan más artículos y citas sobre mamíferos paleárticos que sobre mamíferos neotropicales; este sesgo es peor en WoS y significa que se necesita un aumento urgente en la investigación indexada sobre especies neotropicales para estar al nivel de la investigación paleártica.

16 Pags.- 12 Figs.- 8 Tabls., Soil erosion can present a major threat to agriculture due to loss of soil, nutrients, and organic carbon. Therefore, soil erosion modelling is one of the steps used to plan suitable soil protection measures and detect erosion hotspots. A bibliometric analysis of this topic can reveal research patterns and soil erosion modelling characteristics that can help identify steps needed to enhance the research conducted in this field. Therefore, a detailed bibliometric analysis, including investigation of collaboration networks and citation patterns, should be conducted. The updated version of the Global Applications of Soil Erosion Modelling Tracker (GASEMT) database contains information about citation characteristics and publication type. Here, we investigated the impact of the number of authors, the publication type and the selected journal on the number of citations. Generalized boosted regression tree (BRT) modelling was used to evaluate the most relevant variables related to soil erosion modelling. Additionally, bibliometric networks were analysed and visualized. This study revealed that the selection of the soil erosion model has the largest impact on the number of publication citations, followed by the modelling scale and the publication's CiteScore. Some of the other GASEMT database attributes such as model calibration and validation have negligible influence on the number of citations according to the BRT model. Although it is true that studies that conduct calibration, on average, received around 30% more citations, than studies where calibration was not performed. Moreover, the bibliographic coupling and citation networks show a clear continental pattern, although the co-authorship network does not show the same characteristics. Therefore, soil erosion modellers should conduct even more comprehensive review of past studies and focus not just on the research conducted in the same country or continent. Moreover, when evaluating soil erosion models, an additional focus should be given to field measurements, model calibration, performance assessment and uncertainty of modelling results. The results of this study indicate that these GASEMT database attributes had smaller impact on the number of citations, according to the BRT model, than anticipated, which could suggest that these attributes should be given additional attention by the soil erosion modelling community. This study provides a kind of bibliographic benchmark for soil erosion modelling research papers as modellers can estimate the influence of their paper., Nejc Bezak and Matjaž Mikoš would like to acknowledge the support of the Slovenian Research Agency through grant P2-0180. Diana Vieira is funded by national funds (OE), through FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P., in the scope of the framework contract foreseen - DL57/2016 (CDL-CTTRI-97-ARH/2018 - REF.191-97-ARH/2018), and acknowledges CESAM financial support of through (UIDP/50017/2020+UIDB/50017/2020). Jae E. Yang and Pasquale Borrelli are funded by the EcoSSSoil Project, Korea Environmental Industry & Technology Institute (KEITI), Korea (Grant No. 2019002820004). Walter Chen is funded by the Ministry of Science and Technology (Taiwan) Research Project (Grant Number MOST 109-2121-M-027-001).

En este artículo se propone un análisis del impacto de la investigación en comunicación a través del estu-dio comparado de la citación en los principales formatos de publicación -libros y artículos- en las áreas de periodismo y de comunicación audiovisual y publicidad. Para ello, se han tomado como referencia las tres publicaciones de mayor impacto de 281 investigadores de universidades públicas españolas, contando así con 843 trabajos que han arrojado un total de 72.993 citas según Google Scholar. La investigación concluye la convivencia armónica de formatos en este campo, si bien los libros muestran un mayor recorrido temporal mientras que las revistas son claramente elegidas por los investigadores de menor edad. Dichas conclusiones son finalmente contextualizadas en el marco de las actuales políticas de la investigación en España. This paper offers an analysis of the impact of research in communication through a comparative study of cita-tion in main publication formats -books and papers- in the areas of journalism, audiovisual communication and advertis-ing. With this aim, the three publications with greatest impact of 281 researchers (199 headlines and 82 professors) from Spanish public universities have been taken as a reference, thus counting 843 papers, that have yielded a total of 72,993 citations, according to Google Scholar. The research concludes that there is and harmonious coexistence of formats in this field, although the books show a longer time course while the journals are clearly chosen by the younger researchers. These conclusions are finally contextualized within the framework of current research policies in Spain.

Disclosure of personal disease‐related information to asymptomatic adults has been debated over the last century in medicine and research. Recently, Alzheimer's disease (AD) has been conceptualized as a continuum that begins with a “preclinical” stage in which biomarkers are present in the absence of cognitive impairment. Studies have begun assessing the safety, psychological, and behavioral effects of disclosing both AD‐related genetic and biomarker information to cognitively unimpaired older adults. Yet, debate continues over the appropriate circumstances and methods for returning such information. This article outlines concerns with and rationale for AD biomarker disclosure and summarizes findings from prior studies. Overall, this article aims to describe and respond to key questions concerning disclosure of amyloid positron emission tomography scan results to asymptomatic adults in a research setting. Moving forward, such conditions are important to consider as interventions target the preclinical phase of AD and normalize disclosing biomarker information to cognitively unimpaired persons.

The funding process is increasingly under scrutiny in order to ensure the effectiveness of research investments. This paper contributes to improve our understanding of the effects of funding on research performance through the analysis of the scientific publications of Spain-based researchers in seven disciplines during a five-year period. Funding data are extracted from the “Funding acknowledgment” field of the WoS database. Firstly, funded research is compared to the non-funded one regarding impact and collaboration through bivariate analyses. Funded research is published in more prestigious journals, attains higher citation rates and is developed in teams of greater size in all disciplines, but only in a few of them is associated to greater extra-mural collaboration. Secondly, a logistic regression model is used to explore whether funding contributes to explain the likelihood of papers to attain citation rates above world average controlling for other variables such as prestige of publication journal and collaboration. Thirdly, funding shows direct and indirect effects on the citation rate of papers. Indirect effects are mediated through the publication of more complete papers, in more prestigious journals and with more extensive collaboration, although the presence and magnitude of these effects vary by discipline. The results are discussed in the context of their interest for research policy., This research was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) [grants CSO2014-57826-P and BES-2015-073537] and the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) [grant 201810E052]

Crowdsourced data have played an increasing role in research in the sciences over the past decades. From their early instantiations in the 1990s to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, the concepts of crowdsourcing and citizen science have gained renewed popularity with the broad availability of big data systems. The OpenSky Network has been a poster child of the successful use of crowdsourced data in research and citizen science for many years, with more than 150 peer-reviewed publications using its data. In this article, we follow the efforts made and the results achieved by the OpenSky Network as a non-profit organization with the mission to advance research in and around aviation. We examine the backgrounds and typical usage patterns of OpenSky’s users, both academic and non-academic. We further look at the social impact of air traffic data, particularly during the COVID-19 crisis, and finally examine ways to improve some existing gaps in the data.

Investment in biomedical research is believed to drive economic growth and increase human capital, leading to increased productivity and sustainability. Unfortunately, such positive impacts are not palpable among the resource-poor countries. This can be attributed to the poor quality of research findings and the reliability of findings, which often are rarely translated to impactful products or decisions. While the Nigerian governments are making considerable efforts to improve the quality of research through increased funding, as well as sponsorship and training of scholars in technologically advanced institutions. This is in order for the transfer of knowledge to improve the livelihood of its citizens. However, there is still need for the private multinational organizations to support this course., Lay abstract Lack of quality research constitutes an impediment to the growth and development in Nigeria. Despite the enormous human resources Nigeria has, only a fraction of its research outputs is palpable. This is despite the challenges facing the country, many of which are manageable via robust and efficient research. Notably, among these barriers are lack of funding, equipment and mentoring. Addressing these barriers is a step toward improving research capacity and output. This paper represents a perspective on ways to tackle the challenges as well as the success stories recorded.

Research organizations, governments and funding agencies are increasingly interested in the impact of research beyond academia. While a growing literature describes research impacts in healthcare and health services, little has focused on occupational health and safety research. This article describes a research impact model that has been in use for over a decade. The model was developed to track and describe the impact of research conducted by a mid‐sized institute that focuses on work and health. Model development was informed by existing models, with the goal of contextualizing the institute's case studies describing three types of research impact: evidence of the diffusion of research; evidence of research informing decision‐making; and evidence of societal impact. A logic model describes research actions and outcomes, as well as key audiences and knowledge transfer approaches. A unique element is its indication of the level of difficulty in determining types of impact. The model compares well with current research impact models developed or used in healthcare and health services research, and it has been useful in guiding a mid‐sized research organization's process for tracking and describing the impact of its research. It may be useful to other small and mid‐sized research organizations that focus on workplace health and safety.

Scientists devote substantial time and resources to research intended to help solve environmental problems. Environmental managers and policymakers must decide how to use the best available research evidence to prioritize actions leading to desired environmental outcomes. Yet decision‐makers can face barriers to using scientific evidence to inform action. They may be unaware of the evidence, lack access to it, not understand it, or view it as irrelevant. These barriers mean a valuable resource (evidence) is underused. We outline a set of practical steps for scientists who want to improve the impact their research has on decision‐making: (a) identify and understand the audience; (b) clarify the need for evidence; (c) gather “just enough” evidence; and (d) share and discuss the evidence. These are guidelines, not a strict recipe for success. But, we believe that regularly following these recommendations should increase the chance of scientific evidence being considered and used in environmental decision‐making. Our goal is for this article to be accessible to anyone, rather than a comprehensive review of the topic.