Whether you’re an early career researcher, or at a more advanced stage in your career trajectory, chances are that you are under pressure not only to publish more but also to increase the impact of your research. Impact itself is a somewhat nebulous term, but my understanding is that it encompasses things like citations (academic impact) and real-world applications of your research (external impact).
But what can one do to maximise research impact? While there is much advice (including on this blog) on other aspects of publishing, achieving research impact is perhaps less well covered. To help with this, the LSE Impact of Social Sciences group have produced a helpful handbook entitled Maximising the Impacts of Your Research: A Handbook for Social Scientists, where you can find advice on understanding and maximising impact.
What makes this handbook useful?
The authors note that:
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.
What can you find in this handbook?
The handbook provides a lot of useful practical advice that can help you to maximise research impact, both academic and external. Some of the topics it covers include:
- What shapes the citing of academic publications
- Tracking citations, including new-internet based tracking systems
- Key measures of academic influence
- Strategies for getting better cited
- External (i.e., non-academic) research impacts
Download the handbook
You can access the book, Maximising the Impacts of Your Research: A Handbook for Social Scientists, by clicking on the button below:
About me
Achilleas Kostoulas is an applied linguist and language teacher educator at the University of Thessaly (Greece). He holds a PhD and an MA in TESOL from the University of Manchester, UK. He has published extensively about language teaching and language teacher education.
About this post
This post originally appeared on 13 November 2013. The content of the post does not reflect the view of my current or past employers.
Leave a Reply