Maximising the impact of your research

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Just to add to that brief biography of Kudos, Sally Hardy and the Regional Studies Association have been fantastic champions of what we are doing so thank you very much for that support as well as for having me here today!

I thought it would be helpful to start by thinking about why everyone is talking about impact – why organizations like the RSA are focusing conferences on it!

Academia is under pressure in a number of ways.
In most countries, funding is at an all time low and so winning grants is increasingly competitive.
Despite this, more and more research is taking place and therefore the literature is growing at an ever faster pace, and it’s increasingly hard to ensure that your work finds its audience.
And yet you are expected to find an audience, both within and often beyond the field – there’s a growing demand for public engagement with research, even public accountability, which has created this strong focus on impact which I only half-jokingly call a cult of impact.

And of course the impact of your work is inherently bound up with your personal reputation.
I was doing a project earlier this year where I was talking to researchers about the nature of reputation – what they think it consists of, how they manage it, how they measure the effect of their efforts.
One researcher made the relatively obvious point to me that “reputation opens doors”.
But what surprised me was another researcher saying that reputation is not “opening doors” in the sense of helping you get the job, or the impression you make when you get to interview - it’s about whether you’ll even get a chance to apply – whether you even know that job exists. She flagged up just how many things like jobs, funding, opportunities for volunteering and making connections –don’t get advertised; those “recruiting” turn to who they know – so you’ve got to be “known” and of course one of the best ways to get started is to do work that gets known and make sure that you maximize the impact of that work.
So in that sense, “reputation” and “impact” are almost synonymous here. Impact is important on a personal level because it opens doors. And sometimes they’re “secret” doors that you wouldn’t even see if the impact you’d created with earlier work wasn’t opening them for you.

http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-287437913/stock-photo-secret-door-in-the-bookcase-mysterious-library-with-candle-lighting-with-vintage-stuff.html

How else do we define impact? Two common ways, quoting the UK research councils:
Firstly: Academic impact – “The demonstrable contribution that excellent research makes to academic advances, across and within disciplines”
In case you aren’t following my visual analogy, this is academic advances - “standing on the shoulders of giants”

Secondly, there’s Economic and societal impact: “the demonstrable contribution that excellent research makes to society and the economy, … by
fostering economic performance and competitiveness
increasing the effectiveness of public services and policy,
enhancing quality of life, health and creative output.”

Helping academic work have impact is almost a discipline within itself.

I led a workshop at a conference earlier this year where we talked about who is responsible for impact and this jumble of people, teams, departments, professions is an attempt to summarize the conversation we had. Even just within the academic institution there are a lot of people who care about, or can play a role in, impact!
But for me the most critical group here is the researchers – it’s you. Thinking back to the idea of impact “opening secret doors” – you have most to gain from increasing the impact of your work, and you are best placed to do this - from being able to involve potential audiences from the earliest stages of your projects, to being at the centre of the network of people most likely to be interested in or able to act on what you find.

So what kinds of things can you be doing to grow your impact?

Again, I surveyed almost 3,000 academics earlier this year to get a sense of the activities that are most popular, and most effective.
The first part of that is easy to answer – you can see here that conferences are the most common approach to spreading the word about your work, following by academic networking sites such as Academia.edu or ResearchGate, conversations with colleagues, institutional websites and repositories, then email, social networking and so on.

What is harder is for people to be able to track is the effectiveness of these different activities, to determine which of them are really helping to increase impact. That’s very much the problem that my colleagues and I set up Kudos to solve, so I’ll talk a bit more about that in a moment, but I think what this study showed is that while people still rely on trusted older mechanisms for communicating their work, they are increasingly experimenting with new approaches.

One comment that really resonated with me during that project was someone pointing out that successful academics have typically done all of these things – not necessarily as part of a clear strategy, but these are the kinds of activities that correlate to impact. But for early career researchers these days, you do have to have a strategy – because it’s an increasingly competitive environment, and because some people will adopt these new approaches, you can’t any longer leave it to chance that your work will be found, applied, and cited. As one of my colleagues says, “crossing your fingers is not a strategy”.

So what should your strategy be, in terms of maximizing the impact of your work?
I’m going to home in now on your publications.

We all know that close attention is paid to how and where you publish, and the performance of your work post-publication. I heard a great anecdote recently from a friend who had had a temp working in her lab. No-one had paid much attention to the temp until they learned that she’d had a paper in Nature. My friend said “suddenly we treated her like a rock star”.

So rightly or wrongly, for the near future, it is your publications that will shape your career progress, so let’s focus on how you can increase their impact.

And publication impact is ultimately driven by readership.
Whether we’re talking about academic impact, or broader societal and economic impact,
people can’t cite your work or apply your work if they can’t find it and read it.
So be strategic about making sure people find your work!
Have a checklist of things you can do

This is the checklist that I’ve put together for myself – I’ll go through some of these points in more detail to suggest tools and techniques you could use but essentially I break it down into three stages of activity.

During the project I’ll try to put as many outputs as possible online, and I’ll be looking for conferences where I can showcase my work and putting forward a submission, and I’ll be building up a network of people that are interested in my work.

Then at the point of publication, I’ll make sure I’m joining the dots between the materials I’ve already put online and the publication when it goes live. At that point I’ll also add a plain language summary – I’ll talk a bit more in a moment about why that’s helpful – and, critically, obviously – I’ll tell people that I have published something! Actually I say obvious but it has taken me some time to overcome my modesty in doing this, and I think that is something many of us suffer from that inhibits the impact of our work.

Then afterwards I’ll make sure I keep connecting the work to newer materials, either things I’ve created, or things it’s gone on to influence – for me, that might be press coverage or someone else’s related project, for you that might be a policy document or evidence of how your work has been applied in practice.

Measurement is key to everything I do. Like anyone, I don’t have much time to be doing this kind of thing and I’ve got to find ways of focusing on the tools and techniques that are most effective.

So let’s have a closer look at some of the tools I’d recommend.

Firstly, if you’re in an institution, do consult your library or research office or communications team about tools they can put at your disposal. There might be an institutional repository where you can put documents, data, and indeed your publications in due course – and there might be people able to help you in publicising the outputs of your work.

But there are also plenty of sites that you can use by yourself. I’m sure you’ll be familiar with Slideshare, but did you know that can use it for documents, infographics and videos as well as slide decks?

And you’ve probably heard of Figshare too – where you can put figures, data and video – one of the best things about Figshare is that you will get a “digital objective identifier” or DOI for everything you put in there, which is more “persistent” than a URL and therefore provides a more future-proof way of storing and linking to your work.

Other popular sites include Github for code, YouTube for video, I’m sure you all have your own places where you’re storing stuff online! I’m not necessarily suggesting that you would set up and use all of these platforms – you’ll pick those that are most relevant to the type of materials you create – but what I am encouraging is to think early on during your work about what kind of outputs you’re creating and whether it’s possible or appropriate to start putting them online, because then you can use them to start building the visibility and impact of your work from the earliest possible stage.

The other thing you can be doing during the lifespan of the project, and indeed, something you’ll be doing all the time throughout your career, is building up a network of people whose work you’re interested in, who therefore might be interested in your work too.

Now obviously there are academic networks like Academia.edu or ResearchGate – and these can be great, in that they are popular among academics already so you’ll probably find it easy to find and connect with people you’re interested in. But they’re restricted to academic users –so you’re restricting yourself to academic impact if you only communicate through those networks.

And in fact academics are strongly represented in general social networks, like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, blogs – so exploring those to find and follow relevant people may be a better use of your time, because you’ll be opening yourself up for connections with a broader audience and therefore broadening the potential reach and impact of your work. I know people are often concerned about the effort involved in building a social network but I think this is getting easier and easier as the sites grow in popularity and behavioural norms have started to emerge. So if you’re using Twitter, start with someone you know is on there – mine their followers to find other people you might know – follow what they’re saying, and see who interacts with their work-related postings to find other potentially interesting people that you can follow. It’s very common that they will start to follow you back, particularly once you start liking their posts, resharing them or posting interesting links or comments of your own. Certainly I’ve worked with a lot of academics who were surprised and pleased at how quickly they were able to build an online network, and actually to get value from it in terms of being able to pose questions to that group and have useful debates and collaborative discussions - as well, of course, as building the visibility of their work, which we’ll come on to.

But if you’re really not comfortable with social media, don’t forget about good old email. It’s still a widely used communication tool so when you’re at conferences and things do make sure you try and get the email address of people you meet who you might want to follow up with in future – don’t be shy about asking to connect in person or online!

So using some of those tools and techniques, you’ve been preparing for the point of publication and can now pull it all together to maximize the readership and impact of the journal article or book or chapter that you publish.

You can see I’ve added the Kudos logo in the middle here – I’ll give you a whistlestop tour of our tool in a moment, I promise, but one of the key reasons we set it up is that we were doing all of these activities, posting our outputs online, communicating through social media and email, and it felt like they were happening in silos – separate activities, in separate website, not really building on each other, and not working as hard as they could together to build the impact of our publications.

What we wanted was to be able to connect publications back to all these materials and resources that we’d been putting online, which often weren’t cited in our publications because they had only come into existence while the publication was in press, say, or because they weren’t really the kinds of things you would cite, but nonetheless it seemed helpful to connect them up.

And on a related note of what is helpful, we also saw a need for a platform that would enable people to explain their work in plain language. If you’re seeking to broaden the impact of your work, you have to make it visible and understandable to people who won’t necessarily be using the same academic language as you – they might be people outside your field or discipline, with their own vernacular, or they might be practitioners or media or “citizen scholars” – so summarizing the work will help it show up in search results for queries that don’t use the formal language of the work itself, and then when people arrive at the work, a plain language explanation will also help them more quickly understand whether it will be useful or relevant for them.

So I’ve touched a few times on what we’re doing at Kudos, and thought it would be useful to give you a quick overview of our toolkit. It is a simple process – it takes perhaps 20 minutes the first time you does this, and then perhaps 10 minutes each time you have a new publication.
We provide you with a “profile” page for each thing you publish, where you can ”explain” it in plain language by answering two simple questions: what is it about, and why is it important. You can also add links to all your slides, data, videos, press coverage, anything else online that relates to the work.
Then we give you a trackable link for sharing the work. If you’re a social media user, you can connect up your Facebook, Twitter or LInkedIn accounts and actually post to them directly from your Kudos page. But you can also take our trackable link and paste it into an email, or a blog post, or a presentation, or a reading list etc.
It’s that trackable link that then enables us to map your communication effort against your publication metrics. What you see on the right there is our “matrix of metrics” and this is the only site where you can see in one place what you did to share your work, how many people acted on that, and what effect that’s had on views of your work, downloads, online discussion and citations.

None of us has a lot of time for outreach efforts, so it’s critical that we keep track of whether using some of these tools and techniques is actually increasing the impact of our work.

Measurement of impact is another area that is a discipline in and of itself – bibliometrics, scientometrics, altmetrics.

Some of the potential metrics by which publication performance or impact is measured are more established and familiar than others – so citations is obviously the most recognized measure of academic impact, and underpins widely-used metrics like the Impact Factor (for journals) or the h-index (for people). But in the digital age there are many more metrics that can be tracked – such as how many times your work has been shared or mentioned online, clicks and views, downloads. I tend to look at them as a spectrum relating to different levels of engagement with a piece of work – so social likes shows that people have acknowledged the existence of work, have paid attention to it – but only if they actually click through and view it can you really say they’re interested, and only if they actually download it can you really say they read it, and only if they cited it can you really say they acted on it. Now, mostly, we’ll be seeking to improve those at the right-hand end of this spectrum, because those are the metrics by which we are evaluated, those are the metrics that traditionally stand for impact. The challenge that metrics researchers and practitioners face is to try to understand the relationships, if any, between these different metrics

And the challenge for you is to understand the relationship between those metrics and your own efforts to improve them. And that’s something that Kudos helps with; by providing a central channel through which you can manage communications about your work, and by bringing together this wide range of publication metrics, we are gradually building up a dataset that can map communications to results, and in the process, map different kinds of metrics together. So we can not only give you the answers as to which kinds of communications tools or techniques are more or less effective for you to build impact, we can also start to answer the questions about which ”attention” metrics correlate to which “action” metrics. And a final advantage of that is that we can help you therefore to justify time spent on communications – to yourself, or to your supervisors and so on – because we can then show communications as a whole do increase impact.

We were approached about this time last year by a research group at Nanyang Technological Institute in Singapore, and they asked if they could take a dump of our data and undertake some analysis of the effectiveness of what we’re doing. There were about 5,000 articles in a test group, which had been shared through Kudos, and a similarly sized control group of articles for which the Kudos tools had not been used.

The team looked at average downloads of these articles on the various publishers’ websites, and found that articles for which the Kudos tools had been used had 23% higher downloads on average than those articles for which the tools weren’t used.

So this is starting to become the kind of evidence that academics are looking for to inform an impact strategy and justify time spent implementing it!

I started to do a separate slide and realised I was just recreating my checklist!

I think some of these are more obvious than others – I’m sure you do already submit your work for conferences, and you probably do already have networks that you’re building up, whether in social networks, academic networks, or offline.

So I’ve highlighted the 3 that I think are at the intersection of “most important” and “least likely to be happening already”! And these are my top 3 take-aways for you today - and to make that even easier I’ve distilled it down to three specific actions you can take!

Thank you and good luck!