Research impact

Impact is about looking at the effects a piece of research has had. There are many different ways your research could have an impact depending on the nature of the work. Some key terms and areas of impact are:

In the UK, for example, the REF (Research Excellence Framework) emphasizes the cultural or societal aspect, defining impact as “an effect on, change or benefit to the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality of life, beyond academia”.

Governments providing public funding strive to ensure that research of the highest quality is produced, and that research can demonstrate a clear positive contribution to society. Being able to demonstrate impact allows them to continue to justify providing funding to research in this way.

For example, the REF (Research Excellence Framework) is the UK’s system for assessing the quality of research in UK HE institutions. Impact will be worth 25% in the REF2021 assessment which is used to allocate funding of research in the UK. Find out more about the Research Excellence Framework.

Impact in research grant applications

Most funding councils and bodies ask for evidence of impact in their funding applications to help make sure that research they’re investing in delivers as many benefits as possible.

We are delighted to showcase the work of expert authors, across the human, social and natural sciences, around the red hot topic of research impact.

Our global portfolio of books and journals contains countless insights into research impact, whilst increasing awareness and understanding. The collection also provides practical tips for researchers around the world.

Browse our Research Impact Collection today.

Promoting your research article can help you increase your impact as a researcher. It can encourage your peers to use your work, generate greater awareness of it, and develop your professional profile and reputation. There are many different tools and approaches for doing this, so here are some ideas to get you started:

Use social media to promote your article

Increasingly researchers are turning to social channels to help share their research. As a first step, check to see which platform your peers and intended readership are using and engaging with the most – you don’t need to be active on all the channels. Here are some quick tips for promoting your article on some of the key social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn):

• Announce your published work along with a link to your article. Tag co-authors, your publisher (e.g. @tandfonline), funder and institution, and anyone else you think might be interested in your paper. For Twitter you can post multiple times a day, whereas Facebook and LinkedIn once per day is optimum.
• Include hashtags that your intended audience are using, doing a little research on Twitter beforehand to find the best ones to use. This will make your tweet part of a bigger conversation, meaning you might reach an even wider audience for your research. If you’re attending a conference use the conference hashtag (e.g. #ScholarlySummit) to discuss ideas raised during the conference, as well as to make connections during and afterwards.
• Consider including a relevant and engaging image, gif or video to represent your article, as this can make posts more appealing and encourage people to read and click. Also, make sure the image is copyright free before using, or ensure to give credit to the artist.
• Avoid technical jargon, and translate your research into 1 or 2 sentences that non-experts can understand.

Find out more on using Twitter with our guide for researchers. 

Join an academic research sharing network

There’s a range of research sharing and networking sites out there that many researchers take advantage of to share their research and raise their profile. Some of the common ones that you might be familiar with are ResearchGate, Mendeley, Academia.edu and Loop.

If you have a profile on any of these platforms, then add a link to your article on your profile. Not sure which version you can post? Find out how you can share your work.

Create a Google Scholar profile

Google Scholar is a popular search engine for finding scholarly literature, so adding your articles and publications to your Google Scholar profile can help drive the readership of your work. Be sure to make your profile ‘public’ when you create it.

Here are some useful step-by-step instructions for creating a Google Scholar profile.

Write a blog post

Hone your writing skills by distilling a paper or thought process into a brief, readable blog post (while at the same time driving the impact of your work).

Read our how-to guide for writing an academic blog post, including how to structure it and examples.

Create a video abstract

A video abstract lets you introduce readers to your article in your own words, telling others why they should read your research.

These short videos (three minutes or less) are published alongside the text abstract on Taylor & Francis Online and are an increasingly popular way of getting others to engage with published research, increasing the visibility of your work.

Find out more about creating a video abstract. 

Share your eprints

An eprint is a free, online link to an author’s article sent to all authors who publish in a subscription-based Taylor & Francis or Routledge journal as soon as their article is published. Authors are sent the link via email and can access it at any time from Authored Works, as well as check how many they’ve used.

Discover some of the ways you can share your eprint to drive impact.

Present your paper at a conference

Attending and presenting at conferences can help make other researchers more aware of your work. We’ve put together a guide for how to get the most out of academic conferences, including how to present at conferences for maximum impact.

Read our guide to academic conferences

Speak to your librarian, use your networks

Check your institution has a subscription to the journal you published in. If not, recommend it for the next subscription year. Get your students reading and talking about your article. How? Add it, or the journal it’s included in, to your course’s essential reading list.

Include your article in your email signature

Why not include a link to your research in your email signature, alerting everyone you email to your latest article? Many of the people you contact professionally are likely to be working in the same or similar fields as you. This is a quick and easy way to tell them you’re published.

If you’d like a banner to use in your emails, then just add the details of your article to our self-service form. Your personalized banner will be automatically generated and ready to you to download.

Update web pages

Lots of people browsing your institutional and departmental websites? Use this to your advantage by adding a link on your departmental profile page, directing people to your latest article.

Understanding article versions

If you’re publishing in a Taylor & Francis or Routledge journal, there are many ways you can share your work with colleagues and peers. Before sharing your article, it is important to understand the options available for different versions of your article:

• Author’s Original Manuscript (AOM)/Preprint – The AOM is your original manuscript (sometimes called a “preprint”) before you submitted it to a journal for peer review.
• Accepted Manuscript (AM) – The version of a journal article that has been accepted for publication in a journal.
• Version of Record – A fixed version of a journal article that has been made available by … a publisher by formally and exclusively declaring the article ‘published’.

Read our guide to find out how you can share different versions of your article.

Each individual article you publish will accrue data about how many times it has been downloaded, cited, and talked about or referenced outside of the traditional channels.

Read more about article-level metrics, including the Altmetric Attention Score.

Your work contributes to, and can benefit from, the impact potential of the journal you publish in. The impact profile of a journal might be an important consideration for you when choosing where to publish.

Our extensive guide to journal-level metrics will help you to learn more about these metrics, including weighing up the pros and cons.

To learn more about understanding your research impact, sign up to one of our free learning programs. The learning programs are delivered by email, and each week you’ll receive a link to one PDF chapter, which you can access whenever is most convenient for you. Over 12 weeks those chapters will build into an indispensable guide you can continue to use throughout your research career.

Research communication, sometimes called ‘science communication’, involves communicating your research in an engaging and understandable way to those outside of academia. But it goes beyond just communicating your final article or results, it’s about managing communication with stakeholders throughout the entire research process. As a Sense about Science guide recommends, ‘Involve the public. And involve them early’.

Research communication is important for several reasons, not least because it’s about giving back to society and demonstrating the value of research that public funds often support.

“I think that decision makers and society in general needs to have access to what we do at a level that they can understand, and that they can connect the dots of why it is important to support the scientific and the research enterprise.” 

Gabby Silberman, Director General of the Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology

1. Consider your audience. Think about how to pitch your project to people coming from different backgrounds.
2. Simplify your language. Save the elaborate language for academic papers and specialist conferences.
3. Present your work… earlier on in the project. “While many universities encourage students to present papers at conferences only from the second year of doctoral research onwards, my experience shows that it can be beneficial at an earlier stage too.”

Read 5 tips for communicating your research

“Research and policy should be the best of friends. With university researchers under increasing pressure to demonstrate the impact of their work, and politicians requiring evidence to inform their policies and convince the public they’re making the best decisions, warm feelings should be mutual – research matters to policymaking, and policy making influences research.”

Despite its importance, engaging with policymakers is not straightforward and there isn’t one clear route for doing it. So, we’ve put together some tips for how you might approach it.

Tips for engaging with policy makers

1. Invest time to finding out who is making the policy decisions relevant to your research. Follow what they are doing on their websites, via Twitter, go to their events (and invite them to yours!). Make sure that you are visible online so policymakers can find you.
2. Prepare your research in a way that is relevant to policymakers: “A one-page summary, with key findings/ recommendations & top-line research context is ideal for initial comms. Pitch your comms at an intelligent, non-specialist audience. Lose the jargon, & use bullet points, headings & charts to make it accessible & digestible.”  – Sarah Foxen, Knowledge Exchange Unit, UK Parliament
3. “So what?” What is the policy problem that your research can help to solve? Don’t tell policy makers what you want, ask them what they need.
4. Use your networks. Find out if your institution has an outreach officer. Contact the policy officer of your scientific society or professional association.
5. Understand the context of the policy. Your research will never respond to the entire policy question, so try to understand the bigger picture of the problem that your research is looking at. Be honest about limitations and caveats.
6. Consider adding a secondary abstract to your paper. Clearly communicate the significance of your research via Key Policy Highlights to support the uptake of your research into decision-making.

If you want to work with UK parliamentarians then read our guide, ‘Getting your research into the UK Parliament‘, featuring expert tips from POST (Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology) on how to get your research policy-ready for UK government.

There’s also a wealth of useful advice on the Research impact at UK Parliament hub.

If you think your research is relevant to EU policy, then read our guide ‘Getting your research into the European Parliament’. Different routes into the European Parliament include:

• Via the EPRS (The European Parliamentary Research Service)
• European Commission proposals
• MEP initiatives
• Intergroups

Engaging with the media is one of the best ways to raise awareness about your research to the public and policymakers.

Not all research articles may the grab the attention of a busy and increasingly-pressured journalist however, and some do have a better chance of piquing their interest than others.

Read our step-by-step guide which explains why and how you can work with the media to increase your research impact.