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Critical perspectives on impact

Celebrating your unsung impacts

In the previous issue of this magazine, we asked you to send us your unsung impacts; the sorts of stories your press office isn’t interested in and which you will never submit to any research evaluation. These are often stories you care deeply about, and many are incredibly inspiring. By allowing these stories to remain unheard, we allow our institutions to narrow and instrumentalise the public’s view of the value of research. It may not be “strategic” to tell these stories, but it is essential that we do, to celebrate the rich diversity of benefits that can arise from research.

 

We weren’t sure how to showcase these impacts, but it quickly became apparent that we would have to be selective about which impacts we included, as some entries were incomplete, and others appeared to be unsung for good reasons. To showcase as many as possible, this article celebrates those that met our criteria (our “shortlist”), all of which are truly inspiring. However, as we discussed different ways of recognising the unsung impacts that were submitted, the importance of celebrating these impacts became clearer, and in an attempt to further raise the profile and importance of these types of impact, we decided to turn the initiative into a prize (the winner receives £1000). We’ll reveal the winner at the end of the article, but first, here are all the impacts that were shortlisted:

 

  • Dr Esmee Hanna (De Montfort University): male infertility  

  • Dr Wendy Dossett (University of Chester): recovery from substance addition

  • Dr Sara MacKian (Open University): Spiritualism

  • Dr Ian Marder (Maynooth University): restorative justice

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    What were the impacts and why were they unsung?

     

    There are many reasons why impacts may not be recognised, and the entries highlighted a wide range of these.

     

    Limited reach. Dr Esmee Hanna’s De Montfort University research on male infertility had unexpected benefits for the men she interviewed. Although the impact was restricted to her sample of interviewees, for each of those individuals the impact was huge. She has received emails from participants “saying that they appreciated the topic being discussed, that hearing it being talked about made them feel less alone, or that seeing that other men in the research felt the same made them feel they were not the only ones going through this”.

     

    Dr Wendy Dossett from the University of Chester also struggled with limited reach. She is a religious studies scholar studying how people with substance addictions engage with recovery programmes that include the concept of a “higher power”. Participants in The Higher Power Project reported how being invited to reflect on and talk about what “higher power” meant to them as part of the research helped to deepen their recovery, and they found reading the project findings about the higher power concepts of others reassuring. Dr Dossett said “whatever impacts my research does or doesn’t have for REF, the fact that it has helped and reassured the very people who have generously shared their stories with me means a great deal.”

     

    Dr Sara MacKian’s AHRC-funded research on Spiritualism at the Open University led to an exhibition in Stoke-on-Trent in which an uncanny coincidence presented itself to one of the visitors. Part of the exhibition was a recreation of a living room, with photographs dotted around the room of deceased members of the local community. The visitor first noticed that the telephone in the room was the exact same model as a 1980s telephone she had been looking at on eBay the day before, and then noticed a photograph of her grandfather as a baby, which was identical to a photo on her own mantelpiece. She walked over to the photo, touched her grandad, and her daughter took a photo. When she returned home and looked at the photo, she was surprised to see half of her hand was missing and a wavy line ran right through the centre of the picture. It seems a series of events had unfolded which any Spiritualist would naturally put down to the agency of spirit. Spiritualists suggest that the spirit often uses repetition to bring attention to its presence and such repetition could be seen to be at work in this lady’s encounter. Despite not being a Spiritualist, she interpreted the uncanny experience as a sign that her grandfather wanted to say “goodbye”, so she returned to the living room the next day to do just that.

    Top: Recreation of a living room used for Spiritualist gatherings; Middle: photo of a visitor’s grandfather; Bottom: the same photo on the visitor’s mantelpiece at home.

    Unmeasurable impacts. Sara MacKian aimed to achieve spiritual impacts through her research on Spiritualism, which she argued were impossible to measure. However, there are many more tangible impacts that are almost as difficult to evaluate. Dr Ian Marder, a legal academic from Maynooth University, founded a network with researchers, policy makers and practitioners to enable new people to research, understand and practise restorative justice. This has led to impressive numbers of people engaging with the research via social media, conferences, a podcast and policy seminars, but he has no evidence that these led to significant or far-reaching benefits for network members. He explained, “Networks like this have huge value but you can’t track the outcome of every conversation and where it leads when you put researcher and practitioners together like this.” In theory, it would be possible to study this, and had he remained in the UK he says he might have considered investing the time and energy to create a REF case study. But in common with many researchers whose impact is challenging to evaluate, he chose to focus on continuing to generate impacts rather than diverting his time and energy into evaluation.

    Top: Recreation of a living room used for Spiritualist gatherings; Bottom left: photo of a visitor’s grandfather; Bottom right: the same photo on the visitor’s mantelpiece at home.

    Impacts for the “wrong” people at the “wrong” time or place. Depending on who is evaluating your impact, different people, places or time periods may or may not “count”. Some funders have quite prescriptive outcomes they hope to see from the research they invest in, and national evaluations of research have very specific criteria. For example, many academics feel the greatest impacts of their careers come through their students, but this only counts for REF if we can frame these as pedagogical impacts and (ideally) they benefit far more than just our own students. Even more frustrating, and a common reason why impacts are not celebrated in the UK, is that they happened at the wrong time (usually before the current REF period) or place (for example, in a non-participating institution if the academic came from policy, industry or abroad). A less common type of impact for the “wrong person” is when research unexpectedly has significant benefits for the researcher themselves. This happened to Dr Wendy Dossett during her research on recovery from addiction, because she has herself been in recovery for more than 14 years. As she explained: “My own private recovery experiences were never the focus of my research. I wanted to tell the stories of others.  However, an unintended benefit of devoting much of my academic life to this research over the last five years has been to keep me curious about the recovery process, and to keep me engaged in a wider variety of recovery communities and discourses than I would otherwise have been. While I am careful to separate this from academic outcomes, hearing the stories of others has undeniably been of significant personal benefit to my own ongoing recovery.”

    People taking part in the UK Recovery Walk, a national event celebrating recovery from drug and alcohol dependency as part of International Recovery Week, some of whom were interviewed for Wendy Dossett’s project.

    Impacts from ineligible research. Many researchers play roles as knowledge brokers, advising organisations or governments, chairing committees and leading inquiries. The impact of this work can be significant and far-reaching, but if they are doing their job correctly, then they should not be privileging their own research. The fact that they got the job means they have expertise in the area and so it is not inconceivable that they will generate impacts from their research alongside the research of others, but even in this situation it can be hard to disentangle whose work really made the difference. Dr Ian Marder was commissioned by the Council of Europe to write a new law on restorative justice and focused on ensuring the document was evidence-based, but as an early career academic with little of his own research publicly available, most of the evidence came from other researchers. Although this is a problem for REF in the UK, as an Irish academic now, Dr Marder is encouraged to continue working with governments and criminal justice institutions across the EU to implement the law he helped develop, for the good of society, despite the fact that it isn’t based primarily on his research.

     

    Contested underpinning research. There are some unsung impacts that should remain so, for example, where there are doubts over the rigour of the research that underpins them. Impacts based on flawed research may be damaging to society. One of the entries that was not shortlisted was for impacts based on highly contested research. The more controversial a claim, the higher the burden of proof that is required, and in this case, it was not possible to incontrovertibly prove the claims of the research. However, this entry highlights the challenges around generating impacts from contested or controversial research. Whether the grounds for objecting are scientific or moral, many researchers are trying to achieve impacts against the odds, on issues they have researched rigorously and care deeply about, but that make them unpopular with powerful vested interests. If we are convinced that we stand on firm ground with our research, then these can be among the hardest impacts to pursue, requiring tenacity and often personal sacrifice.

     

    Confidential impacts: Confidentiality is the reason for many unsung impacts. Most commonly the evidence of impact is commercially sensitive, and despite assurances of confidentiality and redaction, companies are not prepared to share evidence that would demonstrate the impact of the research. It is often possible to get around these sorts of situations (see the article in this issue in the Managing and evaluating impact section on getting sensitive evidence of impact from companies). However, this is a bigger problem when it is a question of ethics. The testimonials sent via email to Dr Esmee Hanna by infertile men she interviewed describe significant benefits to the participants, however, as these emails are between participants and the researcher, they are private (for both ethical and anonymity reasons). Wendy Dossett identifies as a person in long-term recovery, but she keeps her own story private for ethical and anonymity reasons. This is not, she says, out of shame, but because any individual recovery story is interlinked in complex ways with that of others who have not consented to engage in a research process: “In my research project I can’t offer myself the same ethical commitment to anonymity I make to my participants, so I must handle my own confidentiality and anonymity differently. I never speak about my own story beyond identifying as being in long-term recovery. For a qualitative researcher who would normally disclose a relationship to a research site, this is a complex ethical dilemma. However, protecting and benefitting the community within which my research is undertaken has to be front and centre of my research decision-making.” 

     

     

    Be inspired

    Choosing between the four shortlisted entries was challenging, but we are pleased to announce that our unsung impact award goes to Dr Wendy Dossett from the University of Chester for her work on recovery from addiction. What made Dr Dossett’s work stand out was the clear and unexpected benefits received both by herself as a person in recovery and by her participants. We found Dr Dossett’s openness about being a researcher in recovery herself inspiring.

    Dr Wendy Dossett, University of Chester

    On receiving the award, Dr Dossett said:

     

    “I certainly don’t consider myself inspiring, nor think of my recovery as particularly a matter for pride. I’m simply grateful for it and endeavour not to be complacent about it. However, in a depersonalised sense, you’re right, recovery from addiction is in itself inspiring. Its hopelessness and shame transformed into hope and meaning. It’s sometimes said that recovery is something that occurs in the spaces between people; it is a social endeavour. Doing a qualitative research project is also inevitably a social endeavour. The lifeworlds of people in long-term recovery are not well studied or understood, and if studying them turns out to be in itself a ‘pro-recovery’ activity, then I’m pleased about that, even if that is largely unmeasurable. I’m very privileged indeed, both to be in recovery today, and to be able work academically in this area.

    This award is a wonderful idea, because it pushes back against a problematic bureaucratic narrative which excludes more researchers than it includes. I didn’t realise when I responded to Fast Track Impact’s call for accounts of ‘unsung impact’ that I might win a competition. I simply wanted to affirm your idea that so many important impacts are indeed ‘unsung’. However, I’m delighted to have won. We’ll use the prize money to enable people in early recovery to help shape our own research project design going forward, and to facilitate their attendance at national conferences to contribute their experience and ideas to the wider addiction recovery research agenda.”

     

    You don’t have to change the world; if you make one person’s life better, you have achieved impact. That one small impact can have more meaning and significance for you as a researcher than the research findings themselves, and be the thing that keeps you motivated and inspired in your job when it feels like everything else has been measured to death.

     

    Below, the runners-up say what inspiration they draw from their unsung impacts:

     

    “This is why I do research – to improve things, to help shine light on the things that are hidden, to give a voice to those who maybe don’t feel able to use theirs. Being able to change things for one person feels good. Every time a participant thanks me for doing the research or suggests that by helping answer the research questions they feel they are helping others, it is really gratifying and affirms what the true social value of research is about.” Dr Esmee Hanna

     

    “Irish academic culture gave me more freedom to pursue the impacts I was passionate about. I’m a REFugee because I didn’t have enough papers to get a post in the UK at the point in the REF cycle I needed a job. Now as an Irish academic, I am free to pursue impacts in my field that are not based on my own research, as long as it benefits society.” Dr Ian Marder

     

    “It was difficult to measure impact in any scientific or quantifiable way because the particular impact we were really keen on seeking was not materially tangible in any way – it was related to the impact of ‘living with spirit’. Yet as a research team we could see the project had huge impact for our participants in ways which were meaningful for them, regardless of how insignificant or irrelevant they may seem to external audiences. That was all the evidence of impact that we felt we needed.” Dr Sara MacKian

    Acknowledgements: The concept of “unsung impacts” came from Dr Jenn Chubb. Dr Joyce Reed, Managing Director of Fast Track Impact, then had the idea to turn the concept into a prize. Judging was done by Prof. Mark Reed.

    Interrogate your reasons

    Interrogate your reasons for engaging in impact and, whatever they are, let them be YOUR reasons

    Prof. Mark Reed and Dr Jenn Chubb

    In this article we discuss reasons why the impact agenda is often negatively perceived by some academics. We do so by drawing on new research into sources of resistance to impact based on interviews with 51 academics in the UK and Australia between 2011 and 2013.

     

    Following the 2006 Warry report on the economic return on investment in research, anyone working in and around higher education and research would have found it hard to avoid hearing mumblings and/or grumblings about the impact agenda. Considered by many as symptomatic of broader challenges in HE, impact was, at least at first, seen to present dangers to blue-skies thinking; potentially narrowing the ways we fundamentally understand science and its applications.

     

    But since its inception, we have seen a huge investment in impact support across the sector and a growing acceptance and, in fact, a welcoming by many of this development. Impact support teams have been recruited in universities alongside growing incentives for impact, bringing with it new currency and esteem.

     

    But how far have academic attitudes towards impact shifted, if at all?

     

    In a paper we published in British Politics last year, we provided baseline information on the reasons why the impact agenda presented challenges for so many academics at the time of its introduction. Specifically focusing on the sources of this resistance, we discussed academics’ fears that the impact agenda could compromise the quality of some research and potentially undermine many researchers’ intrinsic motivation to generate benefits from their work. 

     

     

    Fears about dwindling quality

     

    Although these may be isolated examples, our research identified a number of ways in which academics feel the impact agenda may compromise research quality.

     

    1. Researchers claimed they were changing the way they wrote grant proposals to prioritise research questions they believed would generate impact, but they felt that these questions rarely pushed the boundaries of their discipline. An archaeology researcher from the UK explained that, “choosing research questions on the basis of real-world need can lead to tedious work that does not push disciplinary boundaries and ends up unpublishable”. One UK psychology researcher alarmingly stated: “I’m doing shit research because I thought that’s what they wanted”. This may be indicative of a misconception around the weighting of impact versus research excellence (excellence has always been weighted higher than impact).

     

    2. Researchers perceived that there was an increased risk of conflicts of interest emerging as they worked more closely with beneficiaries who co-fund or support their work. It is vital that we reflect on the relationship between impact and integrity. For instance, a 1998 study showed that a third of published journal articles in one discipline disclosed financial interests and a 1999 study showed that two-thirds of academic institutions held equity in “start-up” businesses that sponsored their research. There is evidence that industry-sponsored research is associated with publication delays and data withholding, and there are some reports of industry altering, obstructing or even stopping publication of negative studies. Despite these concerns, Australia’s Engagement and Research Assessment, launched in December 2017, asks institutions to report “cash support from research end-users” as an indicator of engagement that is designed to “provide quantitative evidence of links between researchers and research end-users”. It is therefore important to reflect on how impact pathways might affect others external to the academic world, applying principles of ethical conduct just as one would with respect to research. Embedding impact throughout the life cycle will enable this so as to avoid divorcing impact from research.

     

    3. Researchers feel that they are forced to broaden rather than deepen their disciplinary expertise to address real-world problems, leading to “shallow research”. There were concerns that the impact agenda is spreading researcher capacity too thinly, taking time away from research. As researchers are forced to look beyond their core expertise, there is a danger that they prioritise breadth over depth. One UK English literature scholar explained that “impact ... has to grow out of research, yet it pulls us away from research”. Similarly, a mathematician admitted “it does force me a bit in the direction of more shallow and more directly applicable research”.

     

     

    Undermining self-determination and intrinsic motivations for impact

     

    In addition to these immediate concerns around research quality, the interviews revealed deeper concerns about how impact might be changing the motivations of researchers. There is evidence that intrinsic and altruistic motives for engaging with impact (e.g. a desire to benefit others) are being increasingly crowded out by extrinsic motivations for impact (e.g. to get research funding, promotion or improve institutional rankings or reputation). As one UK philosophy researcher said, “it’s unwelcome because it’s measuring and distorting things that people were happy to do”.

     

    This is known as “motivational crowding”. Motivation crowding theory posits that extrinsic motivators such as monetary incentives or punishments may undermine intrinsic motivation. When someone is rewarded for a behaviour they had been performing previously based on intrinsic motivation (e.g. paid for giving blood), the extrinsic motivation can replace or “crowd out” the intrinsic motivation, leading to non-performance of the behaviour when the extrinsic reward is no longer available. Researchers who were intrinsically motivated to pursue impacts prior to the introduction of a research assessment’s rewards and punishments, may stop pursuing impact when they are told that their work will not be submitted, or has been reviewed as low quality.

    Moreover, there were concerns that the impact agenda may affect perceptions of self-determination and self-efficacy, which have been shown to significantly impact on levels of intrinsic motivation. A UK Theatre and Television scholar explained: “The danger is it’s like a Tsunami. It’s crashing over everything and will knock stuff out that is a precious part of what has kept universities going. For many academics it is keeping alive that sense that they have control over what they’re doing that enables them to be valuable and to have impact. You run the risk of taking away a raison d’être”.

     

     

    The politicisation of impact

     

    The politicisation of the impact agenda is a major ideological barrier to many researchers. The political roots of impact policies in both the UK and Australia continue to fuel suspicion that this agenda is an extension of neoliberal attempts to marketise the academy, only valuing knowledge in narrow, instrumental terms as a return on public investment despite attempts from government to demystify these messages and involve the sector. The evolution of research impact away from simplistic metrics (with an emphasis on economic value) towards more holistic conceptions of impact (that are assessed both qualitatively and quantitatively with expert peer review) failed to convince many researchers that the objectives of impact assessment were benign. The shift towards the use of responsible metrics and the implementation of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) in many institutions in 2018, however, marks a step change in these developments in the UK.

     

    The timing of the inception of an impact agenda alongside economic austerity in both the UK and Australia partly explains concerns about the political roots of an agenda designed to protect and justify spending on research in an increasingly competitive public spending environment. This has been further compounded by the top-down approach to the introduction of impact assessment in each country from national research institutions, in collaboration with senior management teams in HEIs who have been among the first to recognise the political imperatives of the impact agenda.

     

     

    How concerned should we be?

     

    It is important not to take all of these findings at face value. Not least since the interviews took place in a pre-REF context, some respondents suggested that the impact agenda had deeper roots that pre-dated its neoliberal hijacking by politicians keen to show a return on their investment in research.

     

    Rather than seeing impact as compromising research, many felt they had a deep responsibility to make a difference with their research. Some felt that it could enrich the research process and enhance research quality by encouraging more joined-up thinking across disciplines. Indeed, for many of these researchers, who often co-produced their research, impact was an indivisible part of the research process.

     

    These academics pointed out that researchers are still able to choose whether to pursue their own research agenda or allow their work to be skewed by their own perceptions of what funders would support. In fact, those who had experience of reviewing were even clearer on this point, revealing a persistent lack of coherent understanding across the community of impact policies and definitions. There is in fact little evidence (other than anecdotal) that impact significantly skews funding decisions, as these are still weighted (heavily in most schemes) towards research excellence. There is even less evidence that impact is actually driving down the quality of research being proposed or conducted.

     

    However, it is clear from this research that negative perceptions of the impact agenda were strong at the time of interviewing. The mechanisms through which impact is purported to be compromising research quality are credible if not proven. It is possible that these mechanisms are already at work and leading to more widespread negative unintended consequences, especially if impact policies continue to be misconceived.

     

     

    What can we do?

     

    Research assessments are inevitably externalising and instrumentalising the motives of researchers around the world. This is a complex issue which is undoubtedly driven from the top down, but which cannot be solved solely by governments or university managers. Instead, we need to find ways of incentivising impact from the bottom up, led by researcher champions and by targeting a wider range of intrinsic motivations. In short, we need to remember why we are doing what we are doing as researchers. We need to remain focused on our intrinsic motives, whatever they are. If we are not intrinsically motivated by the idea of making a difference, then we need to consider how engaging with impact might enable us to express our creativity in new ways, or how the new questions that are raised by publics and stakeholders can further satisfy our innate sense of curiosity.

     

    Have you ever met a researcher who decided to go into this career because they wanted to help their university climb league tables? Ask yourself why you became a researcher in the first place. Look at what motivates you and identify how the pursuit of impact can feed into those motives, rather than allowing the impact agenda to value only money, reputations and rankings. Impact is in fact far deeper and richer than that. Interrogate your motives for engaging in impact and, whatever your reasons, let them by your reasons. 

     

     

    Mark Reed is Professor of Socio-Technical Innovation at Newcastle University. Jenn Chubb is Post-Doctoral Research Associate at University of Sheffield. Mark and Jenn both run impact training for researchers through Fast Track Impact.

     

    Read the full article: Chubb J, Reed MS (2018). The politics of research impact: implications for research funding, motivation and quality. British Politics 13: 295–311.

    Grimpact

    Grimpact: What is it and why does research need to talk about it?

    Dr Gemma Derrick

    No one will disagree with the idea that research is supposed to benefit society, and that research and researchers should be evaluated for their contribution to this societal mission. It therefore comes as an inconvenient truth to those impact evaluation proponents that a fair and robust evaluation of societal impact needs to balance a celebration of positive impacts whilst acknowledging those that do not “benefit” society.

     

    Impact is different to everyone. As we have increasingly seen lately, a public swing towards new, populist political movements results in a public that is prone to confirmation bias, distrusts public experts, is incapable of distinguishing between fake news and evidence, and therefore only values research that conforms to existing ideological conceptions.

     

    Research can have impact, but also can have “grimpact”.

     

    Our exploration of grimpact started nearly two years ago on Twitter.  Angered by the distortion of science to fulfil political aims, three of us started exchanging tweets about our knowledge of impact pathways, and our hypotheses about the nature of negative impact.  Together we developed the concept of grimpact, an exotic take on impact that acknowledges that research is mostly introduced with good intentions but can also, like a weed, spiral out of control.

     

    If you want to know what grimpact looks like, take three extreme examples.  First, the publication of a paper in The Lancet in 2005, later retracted, which led to rejection of the MMR vaccine and resulting deaths from measles.  In addition, along this grimpact pathway exists the generation of anti-vaccine advocacy groups; political campaigns based on fear; a rejection of expertise over anecdotal experience; and a movie screened at the Cannes Film Festival promoted by some of the most prominent Hollywood actors.  This is the most recognised example of grimpact, but other examples include the generation of a tool that was capable of discerning emotions of users on social media platforms.  In the case of Cambridge Analytica, the grimpact started when ethics boundaries were violated by both researchers and users, who then used the tool for political gain as opposed to public benefit.  Finally, a more nuanced example is how the deregulation of financial services and the resulting behaviour of banks underpinning the 2008 financial crisis was validated by an overarching belief in economists and economic theory that promoted free-market, laissez-faire approaches.

     

    These are research grimpacts that the academy does not acknowledge nor promote because there is a political advantage in accepting that research only benefits society.  Research gains the majority of support and funding based on the assumption that it can add value to the public.  This is also reflected in the majority of impact definitions from countries such as the UK, The Netherlands, Norway and Australia and from research organisations committed to assessing societal excellence of research through impact. In the UK specifically, the Research Excellence Framework definitions emphasise “benefits”, and “change” to focus on impacts that can only be positive.  In addition, the public too are conditioned to regard valuable research as research that only makes a positive change.  We see this in the celebration of how medical research has saved lives, how jobs were created, technologies invented or how policies were improved.  These impacts provide a stark comparison to the aforementioned grimpacts.

    What an exclusive focus on impact fails to grasp (and assess) is that a pathway to impact can include mistakes, misdirected tangents, dishonest users and unforeseen circumstances.  In other words, pathways to impact also include grimpact and although impact assessment does recognise that the research journey to impact is not linear, it fails to acknowledge that within these non-linear pathways, or serendipitous tangents, lies grimpact that may act against society’s best interests.  While acknowledging it would be detrimental for the case of public research for the public’s sake, it is essential for a more balanced, and robust impact evaluation. By studying extreme grimpact examples, we hope to initiate a discussion that specifies it dimensions and characteristics towards a more reflective and robust framework for evaluating societal impact.

     

    What we have found is that grimpact is enabled by a violation and breakdown of normal feedback mechanisms between researchers and users.

     

    In addition, if promoting accountability is the aim of impact evaluation, then arguably the same ideal should apply to grimpact, but attribution is more difficult for grimpact. For grimpact it is less clear how to attribute “fault” (the flip side to impact’s “duty”).  Is it the incidence of research misconduct or, more complexly, is it when research was co-opted by stakeholders for purposes beyond the original intentions of the researcher?  Grimpact is also more contagious than impact as the loss of control of the original narrative of the research leads to the message being co-opted by multiple partners who excessively frame or overly promote politically desirable results, while silencing conflicting evidence.  In fact, for grimpact there is such a complex web of interactions with multiple users beyond what is considered healthy science-society partnerships, which go beyond conventional capabilities of capturing impact, that it is almost impossible to assign any blame.

     

    So why does this matter, and why, as a community can’t we just focus on our successes?  Because doing so affects how trustworthy we appear to the public to govern ourselves through evaluation, and how valuable our advice and expertise appears to a public that is currently prone to doubt.

     

    For the future of societal impact assessment at least, grimpact matters.

     

     

    The research is part of the paper “Derrick GE, Faria R, Benneworth B, Budtz-Petersen G & Sivertsen G. (2018) Towards characterising negative impact: Introducing Grimpact”, presented at the 23rd International Conference on Science and Technology Indicators (STI 2018), ‘Science, Technology and Innovation indicators in transition’, 12–14 September 2018, Leiden, The Netherlands”.  http://sti2018.cwts.nl/
     

    Follow Gemma @GemmaDerrick. Her research group tweets @HEGrimpact.

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