Researcher Impact Framework: showing the impact of an individual researcher

  • Jan 2023
  • Bart Wesstein
  • 3
  • 115
  • Claartje Chajes
Bart Wesstein
Kennisbank // Knowledge Base
  • Asli Gulmus
  • Jeroen Jansen
  • Daphne Snackers
  • Marjan van Hunnik
  • Alise Scerbinina
  • Eveline Braber
  • Rob Speekenbrink
  • Claartje Chajes

Learnings from Trinity College Dublin
While a wealth of resources has been developed to help researchers plan for and communicate their projects anticipated impact when applying for funding proposals, not many resources have been developed for researchers when communicating their own impact as researchers at an individual level.

To support researchers in doing this Dr Giovanna Lima and Sarah Bowman, from Trinity College Dublin, have developed the Researcher Impact Framework (RIF). This framework helps to better share a broad spectrum of the researcher’s achievements in generation of knowledge, development of individuals, forming collaborations, supporting the research community and broader society. Giovanna is now part of the Evaluating Societal Impact team at Erasmus University Rotterdam and works closely with our Recognition and Rewards project.

What is the RIF?
The RIF provides a structure for crafting audience-focused evidence-based impact narratives that connect scholarly activities and relevant reach, use and relevance data to scientific and societal outcomes. RIF is accompanied by two bespoke databases to encourage and assist researchers to capture their impact across a range of scholarly activities along their research journeys. Below we share a link to the RIF (PDF).

The development of the RIF
The Framework was formally launched at Trinity in October 2022. It is a result of the authors’ work in the Research Impact Pilot that is ran by the Office of the Dean of Research, the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Institute, and the School of Medicine at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, since 2020. It was informed by the multiple engagement and knowledge exchange opportunities which includes collaborating on capacity-building workshops, profile reviews, and proposal development, with Trinity colleagues.

RIF and Recognition and Rewards
The RIF can be a very useful tool for adequately recognizing and rewarding activities of individual scholars in the core domain ‘impact’. It provides a structure to discern the individual contribution to the impact of the team, department or organization. Erasmus University is currently adapting it to support the development and assessment of narratives in the Dutch context. These learnings will be shared in a workshop at the 2023 R&R Festival.

RIF is available open access at https://doi.org/10.25546/98474 (English), https://doi.org/10.25546/101876 (Portuguese), and https://doi.org/10.25546/101877 (French). You can email the authors at giovanna.lima@eur.nl and bowmans@tcd.ie.

Comments

3 comments, latest: 2 February 2023

  • Thank you very much for your question @robspeekenbrink. I asked Giovanna herself and this is her response:

    Online impact can be understood in different impact areas. More obviously, I'd associate online impact with the impact of contributing to increasing public awareness and informing practitioners, which is one of the important impacts from researchers in the "Key achievements in supporting broader society" (see page 13).

    Being active in social media, including LinkedIn, can be considered in some of the activities in that impact area, such as discussing research on social media is mentioned or blogging. The source for the evidence of impact would be Social media analytics.

    The topic of the online impact can, however, be related to other types of impact, like Developing Collaborations, if that is what LinkedIn is being used for. That is why it's important to consider the personal narrative and the audience when applying RIF, as laid out on page 16.

    I hope this answers your question?

    Bart Wesstein

  • Thanks for your reply @bartwesstein. The evidence of social impact would be social media analytics. I would argue that increasing public awareness can be measured by the narrative, supported with metrics.

    I've helped scientists increase their online impact on social media for a couple of years now. One of the most valuable outcomes of them investing time on i.e. LinkedIn is 'coincidental' conversations.

    Rob Speekenbrink

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