Research Impact: Community Impact and Public Scholarship

Community, Economic, and Social Impact of Research

Researchers' contributions go beyond the academy and include impacts on the economy, industry and business, public policy, culture, behaviour, and society.

This type of impact can include:

Instrumental impacts that influence the development of policy, practice or service provision, shape legislation, or alter behaviour.
Conceptual impacts that contribute to the understanding of policy issues or the reframing of debates.
Capacity-building impact that occurs through technical and personal skill development.

To learn more about societal impacts of research, try the University of Alberta Library's Introduction to Research Impact tutorial.

Factors that Support Impact

Some of the factors that help generate impact include:

Establishing networks and relationships with research users.
Acknowledging the expertise and active roles played by research users in making impact happen.
Involving users at all stages of the research process.
Flexible knowledge exchange strategies.
Developing good understanding of policy/practice contexts and encouraging users to bring knowledge of context to research.
Consistently working towards research infrastructure, leadership, and management support.
Involving knowledge brokers as translators, amplifiers, and network providers.
Supporting space and time for collaborative reflection on research design and process, findings, and overall progress.

Measuring Community Impact

First, the bad news: for a variety of reasons, including the difficulty of attributing societal changes or benefits to a particular research output and time lag between the production of research and its impact, it is not clear how to evaluate the societal impacts of research.

Despite this, some approaches being used are:

Impact narratives or case studies, which include any social, economic, or cultural impact or benefit beyond academia
Financial return, for example selling or licensing research outputs
Expert review
Payback model
Stakeholder surveys
Cost-benefit analysis
Commercialization surveys
Citations or links to academic research in policy documents, white papers, patents, clinical practice guidelines, media, non-academic conferences, and websites
Direct involvement of academics in decision making by government or professional advisory committees, business corporations, interest groups, trade unions, charities, or other civil society organizations

Public Impact Research and Community Impact Tools

The Message Box (COMPASS Science Communication)
The Message Box helps you take the information you hold in your head about your work and communicate it in a way that resonates with your chosen audience.
Plain Language Summary Tool
Guides users through the process of creating Cochrane-style plain language summaries of systematic reviews. An introductory video, a manual, and explanatory materials are available to help users create their plain language summaries.
Going Public: Writing About Research in Everyday Language
This brief describes approaches that writers can use to make impact research more accessible to policy audiences.
plainlanguage.gov
A website that encourages the use of plain language and includes guidelines, training, and examples.
Leveraging artificial intelligence to summarize abstracts in lay language for increasing research accessibility and transparency

ARIS Broader Impacts Toolkit
The ARIS Toolkit can help you communicate the societal impacts of your research.
How can my work benefit society? How can it help solve challenges facing communities? How can I partner with communities to expand the exchange of information, ideas, and expertise in ways that benefit society?
Knowledge Translation Planning Template
This template can be used to plan and evaluate a knowledge translation (KT) strategy. It identifies and documents the steps needed to implement a KT strategy.
Knowledge Translation and Transfer Plan
A toolkit by Ontario's Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs.
KT Resources & Tools
Research Canada Knowledge Mobilization Modules
What do we mean when we talk about “knowledge mobilization”?

Knowledge mobilization (KMb) is a broad term that describes the way knowledge is created, shared, and used in order to create an impact.

In simpler terms, you can think of it as sharing information with people in a way that they will be able to understand it and apply it. By getting the right information to the right people in a way that is easy for them to use and understand, they can transform that knowledge into action.
APLU Impact Research Activation Guide
What is public impact research and why does it matter? Public impact research (PIR) is any research that benefits the public. This may include everything from developing new medications or understanding environmental challenges to examining disparities in education access and economic development.

Our universities were founded specifically to benefit the public, and the research that public and land-grant universities produce serves this need. Now, more than ever, we need to elevate and communicate the impact that public university research has on everyday life. We also need to emphasize the value of collaborative research with communities—not just about communities.

This Activation Guide provides best practices, fresh ideas, and specific recommendations for presidents, chancellors and provosts; research leaders; communications and marketing leads; writers and content creators; and researchers and scholars.

Examples of Public Impact Research
From APLU's public impact research effort
The Conversation
The Conversation is looking for new writers to contribute their ideas for stories, write reactions to current events, and add scholarly opinions on the news. View OSU's tip sheet for pitching story ideas to The Conversation editors.

Attribution

Content in this guide is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License and is adapted from "Research Impact" by University of Alberta Library Research Impact Services which is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 and their Introduction to Research Impact Tutorial