Research Impact: The Challenges
From its instigation, the assessment of research impact has generated challenges. Some of these have come from the researchers and some from commentators in the media or the academic press. The challenges are not unique to REF; rather they have emanated f
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Research Impact: The Challenges
‘I wanted to have an impact but also to have a challenge. Everyone can still have an impact in a small scale’. (Souzana Achilleos [1])
5.1
Introduction
Not everyone welcomed the inclusion of research impact in REF. Once plans were released, the University and College Union [2] organised a petition calling on the UK funding councils to withdraw the addition of impact assessment from the REF proposals. This petition was signed by 17,570 academics (52,409 academics were returned to the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise), including Nobel laureates and Fellows of the Royal Society [2]. Therefore, from the outset, there have been critics of the pursuit of research impact, and while many accepted it as an important concept, some were quick to outline its disadvantages.
5.2
The Attribution Time Lag
In Chap. 2, it was stressed that the research-impact linkage need not necessarily be a linear one. In fact, it could be contemporaneous, or the impact can emerge before the research publications are in the public domain. Nonetheless, the REF guidelines allow that the research underpinning impact can be undertaken over a 20-year period (see Chap. 2). This timeframe has generated a backlash from some researchers who are involved in what is variously referred to as ‘basic’, ‘blue
skies’ or ‘curiosity-driven’ research, especially laboratory-based investigations. They argued that it is impossible to know and attribute the eventual impact (if any) from their research activities. As Werner von Braun stated, basic research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing [3]. In other words, researchers undertaking investigations at the edge of science have little idea of what they will discover. In REF 2014, there was a recognition that this two decade time window may be insufficient in some instances, with architecture, for example, being granted an additional 5-year period. It was also asserted that the innovations that drive economic growth and wealth creation often depend on breakthroughs in fundamental science. Some of these researchers, such as research physicists and mathematicians, claim that it could take years before their research results show impact. They maintained that such impacts are all but unknown when the research is being planned and conducted. The Wellcome Trust is a prestigious research funding body in the UK. Sir William Castell, Chairman of its Board of Governors, seemed to agree with this assertion. He stated that basic research in the UK is great, but there are problems when it comes to building this huge advantage into a flourishing knowledge economy [4].
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 H. P. McKenna, Research Impact, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57028-6_5
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For some non-applied research, this is understandable. After all, Einstein’s general theory of relativity was formulated in 1916 but required the development of the global positioning system (GPS) in 1973 for i
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