Laura Wheeler, Community Manager at Digital Science will be hosting the second webinar, 'Articulating Research Impact – Strategies From Around The Globe'. Ben McLeish from Altmetric will be questioning and moderating the panel consisting of: Jonathan Adams, Digital Science's Chief Scientist, Stacy Konkiel, Research Metrics Consultant at Altmetric and Daniel S. Katz, Senior Fellow in the Computation Institute (CI) at the University of Chicago. The webinar will be taking place on June 24 at 4pm BST / 11am ET.
Research outcomes are diverse, complex and realised over a wide spectrum of time. High quality research, whether basic or applied, delivers economic, social and health benefits, and many in very unexpected and complex ways. This is not always easy to communicate and articulate.
Jonathan Adams and his Consultancy Group in Digital Science have recently created a searchable database of impact case studies, with descriptive metadata, from the 2014 Research Exercise Framework (REF) in the United Kingdom. He is therefore very well placed to be able to give an overview of the different types of impact coming out of the research from one of the world's most established and high quality academies.
Jonathan will share some interesting and diverse examples of impact from the case studies database, and speak to the expectations that administrators have when it comes to selecting tools to help them collect key indicators of impact, pinpoint that impact and then report on it accurately.
Building upon Jonathan's insights, Stacy Konkiel will examine specific examples of impact that were not submitted in the REF2014 impact case studies, but that can showcase certain important types of impact like the influence of research on public policy, technology commercialization, and more. She'll showcase how tools like Altmetric can help researchers easily discover where their work is making a difference in academia and beyond.
Daniel S. Katz will discuss how reviewers at the National Science Foundation (USA) consider the "intellectual merit" and "broader impacts" criteria for funding and in particular how metrics might help applicants understand their impacts in these areas. Dan will also talk about how reviewers might use qualitative and quantitative altmetrics data to inform their peer reviews for grant applications. He will address many of the salient questions around this use of metrics, for instance, do reviewers take metrics seriously and what types of metrics are of most value to them?
