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Maximising the Impacts of Your Research: A Handbook for Social ScientistsIntroduction: Defining Research Impacts
Chapter 1: What Shapes the Citing of Academic Publications
Chapter 2: Using Citation Tracking Systems
Chapter 3: Key Measures of Academic Influence
Chapter 4: Getting Better Cited
Chapter 5: Patterns of external research impacts
Chapter 6: Is there an impacts gap?
Chapter 7: How researchers achieve external impacts
Chapter 8: Organisational impacts
Chapter 9: Expanding external research impacts
Bibliography
About this Handbook
There are few academics who are interested in doing research that
simply has no influence on anyone else in academia or outside. Some
perhaps will be content to produce ‘shelf-bending’ work that goes into a
library (included in a published journal or book), and then over the
next decades ever-so-slightly bends the shelf it sits on. But we believe
that they are in a small minority. The whole point of
social science research is to achieve academic impact by advancing your
discipline, and (where possible) by having some positive influence also
on external audiences – in business, government, the media or civil
society.
For the past year a team of academics based at the London School of
Economics, the University of Leeds and Imperial College have been
working on a ‘Research Impacts’ project aimed at developing precise
methods for measuring and evaluating the impact of research in the
public sphere. We believe the our data will be of interest to all UK
universities how to better capture and track the impacts of their social
science research and applications work.
Part of our task is to develop guidance for colleagues interested in
this field. In the past, there has been no one source of systematic
advice on how to maximize the academic impacts of your research in terms
of citations and other measures of influence. And almost no sources at
all have helped researchers to achieve greater visibility and impacts
with audiences outside the university. Instead researchers have had to
rely on informal knowledge and picking up random hints and tips here and
there from colleagues, and from their own personal experience.
This Handbook remedies this key gap and opens the door to researchers
achieving a more professional and focused approach to their research
from the outset. It provides a large menu of sound and evidence-based
advice and guidance on how to ensure that your work achieves its maximum
visibility and influence with both academic and external audiences. As
with any menu, readers need to pick and choose the elements that are
relevant for them. We provide detailed information on what constitutes
good practice in expanding the impact of social science research. We
also survey a wide range of new developments, new tools and new
techniques that can help make sense of a rapidly changing field.
We hope that this Handbook will be of immediate practical value for
academics, lead researchers, research staff, academic mentors, research
lab leaders, chairs and research directors of academic departments, and
administrative staff assisting researchers or faculty team leaders in
their work.
Download the Handbook in PDF formatImpact of Social Sciences – The Handbook
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