Measuring the societal impact of research
Top Cited Papers
Open Access
- 10 July 2012
- journal article
- Published by Springer Science and Business Media LLC in EMBO Reports
- Vol. 13 (8), 673-676
- https://doi.org/10.1038/embor.2012.99
Abstract
Even before the Second World War, governments had begun to invest public funds into scientific research with the expectation that military, economic, medical and other benefits would ensue. This trend continued during the war and throughout the Cold War period, with increasing levels of public money being invested in science. Nuclear physics was the main benefactor, but other fields were also supported as their military or commercial potential became apparent. Moreover, research came to be seen as a valuable enterprise in and of itself, given the value of the knowledge generated, even if advances in understanding could not be applied immediately. Vannevar Bush, science advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Second World War, established the inherent value of basic research in his report to the President, Science, the endless frontier , and it has become the underlying rationale for public support and funding of science. However, the growth of scientific research during the past decades has outpaced the public resources available to fund it. This has led to a problem for funding agencies and politicians: how can limited resources be most efficiently and effectively distributed among researchers and research projects? This challenge—to identify promising research—spawned both the development of measures to assess the quality of scientific research itself, and to determine the societal impact of research. Although the first set of measures have been relatively successful and are widely used to determine the quality of journals, research projects and research groups, it has been much harder to develop reliable and meaningful measures to assess the societal impact of research. The impact of applied research, such as drug development, IT or engineering, is obvious but the benefits of basic research are less so, harder to assess and have been under increasing scrutiny since the 1990s [[1]]. In …Keywords
This publication has 16 references indexed in Scilit:
- State of the art in assessing research impact: introduction to a special issueResearch Evaluation, 2011
- The Research Excellence Framework and the 'impact agenda': are we creating a Frankenstein monster?Research Evaluation, 2011
- Development of a practical tool to measure the impact of publications on the society based on focus group discussions with scientistsBMC Public Health, 2011
- Measuring research performance during a changing relationship between science and societyResearch Evaluation, 2011
- Metrics: Do metrics matter?Nature, 2010
- The state of h index researchEMBO Reports, 2008
- The Australian Research Quality Framework: A live experiment in capturing the social, economic, environmental, and cultural returns of publicly funded researchNew Directions for Evaluation, 2008
- Peer review and the relevance gap: ten suggestions for policy-makersScience and Public Policy, 2007
- Evaluation of societal quality of public sector research in the NetherlandsResearch Evaluation, 2000
- Evaluating the Benefits from Health Research and Development CentresEvaluation, 2000