About this topic
Research impact is an important topic in the research world. Use this guide to understand what impact means for you and your work, how to measure it, and get tips on sharing your article to increase its impact once it has been published.
What is 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:
- Academic impact: the impact research makes in academia, for example advancing and developing understanding, methods and theory within the field or across disciplines.
- Cultural or societal: the impact research can have on people, culture and society.
- Policy: the impact of research on policy formulation, for example using research as evidence to influence policy decisions.
- Economic impact: impacting businesses and economic growth or development.
- Environmental: impacting the environment. For example this piece of research which explores why having awareness and knowledge about climate change is not always enough for people to behave in a pro-environmental way.
- Health: such as in the development of new drugs or influencing change in medical practice.
Different organizations and funders are interested in different areas of impact, bringing together one or many of these, and possibly others. Check the definition of research impact on your institution’s website and consider which areas of impact are important to you.
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”.
Why is research impact important?
Research impact is an important topic in the research world. Funders, institutions, and researchers themselves are all interested in assessing the quality and impact of research. Some of the different reasons why impact is important are explained in more detail below:
Research funding
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.
How is research impact linked to your career?
Demonstrating the impact of research can help you develop your career as a researcher, whether that be increasing your academic profile, or providing evidence of impact when applying for grants or positions that will allow you to take your career to the next step.
Some examples of impact you might explore are:
- Communication skills you gained through presenting at a conference, or running a public engagement activity
- Project management, gained by coordinating a project with a wider team
- Using quantitative and qualitative information to make evidence-based decisions
Impact activities on your CV
If you’re applying for an academic position, Vitae have some useful guidance on creating an academic CV, with ideas on how you might document impact activities on there as well as examples of CV’s from other researchers.
Research that changes the world
As a researcher, your research has the potential to positively influence the world we live in. If you want to be inspired by how your research can make a difference, listen to our podcast series ‘How Researchers Changed the World’ to hear stories and case-studies from researchers whose research has made a difference.
For the latest news, insights, tips and more straight to your inbox, sign up for the Taylor & Francis Insights newsletter.
Writing to increase research paper visibility
During the writing process, there are techniques you can use to increase your research paper’s visibility once it’s been published, helping to drive your research impact.
Write a good title for your research paper
A good title is specific and includes key words that readers might be searching for. Try to make it understandable to a reader from outside your field and, where possible, avoid abbreviations, formulae, and numbers.
Read our guide to writing titles and abstracts
Select relevant keywords
Selecting relevant keywords for your research paper will help others find your research quickly and accurately. Think of them as labels for your article. When you submit your article, you’ll be asked to provide keywords. These will be used to index your article on Taylor & Francis Online and on search engines such as Google Scholar™.
Find out more about selecting relevant keywords
Optimize your paper for search engines
Selecting relevant keywords is one technique for optimizing your paper for search engines (i.e. making it more searchable online), but there are other things you can do, like including reputable external links to build connections online.
Use our researcher’s guide to SEO for tips
How to promote your research article
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.
Insights on making an impact
Read insights from across the research community on some of the ways researchers are increasing the impact of their work:Presenting your research effectively and with confidenceYour abstract has been accepted for an upcoming academic conference or perhaps you’ve been asked to present your research at an in-house event. Does that thought provoke a sinking feeling in the pit…Transform your conference paper into a prize-winning journal articleIt’s academic conference season in many parts of the world; an opportunity to present your latest ideas and research to your peers (as well as practicing the art of conference networking). Once you’ve…The benefits of online reading groupsBeing a member of an academic reading group or journal club gives you the opportunity to work with others to understand complex material, to network, and to learn from different perspectives. They can…Discover more great stories from the blog
How Taylor & Francis supports you in sharing your work
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.
Share your eprints
All authors who publish in a subscription-based Taylor & Francis or Routledge journal will get 50 free eprints (a free online link to your article) to share with interested readers. From sharing on social media to adding to your institutional webpage, there are lots of ways you can share your eprints to boost your article visibility.
Authored works
Authored works is our dedicated center for all authors who have published in a Taylor & Francis journal. Authored works is where you can download the PDF or view the HTML of your article, get your free eprint link to share with friends and colleagues, check the latest download figures, and more.
To access your Authored works, simply log in to Taylor & Francis Online, and you’ll see Authored works as an option in the left-hand menu. All the articles you have published on Taylor & Francis Online will be listed here, with their associated readership and citation data. You can also keep track of how many free eprints you have left, and easily post an eprint directly to Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn using the social share buttons.
Open access options
We offer a range of open access options, from open research platform F1000Research to hybrid and open access journals. You can either choose to publish “gold” OA or make your article available via “green” OA options.
Find out more about publishing open access
How to measure research impact
As a researcher, you’ll be used to gathering facts and evidence to back up the claims you make in your work. The same is likely to be true of the work you put into improving the impact of your research.
There are a lot of metrics that can allow you to measure impact, but knowing what each one can tell you and how to interpret the data can be challenging. We’ve put together some resources to help you to use and understand these metrics, and most importantly, how to use them in combination to build a full picture of the impact your research has had.
Article-level metrics
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.
Journal-level metrics
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
What is research communication?
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’.
Why is research communication important?
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.
Gabby Silberman, Director General of the Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology
How to communicate research
- Consider your audience. Think about how to pitch your project to people coming from different backgrounds.
- Simplify your language. Save the elaborate language for academic papers and specialist conferences.
- 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.”
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