“We are not stray leaves blowing about in the wind”: exploring the impact of Family Wellbeing empowerment research, 1998–2021

Background An Aboriginal-developed empowerment and social and emotional wellbeing program, known as Family Wellbeing (FWB), has been found to strengthen the protective factors that help Indigenous Australians to deal with the legacy of colonisation and intergenerational trauma. This article reviews the research that has accompanied the implementation of the program, over a 23 year period. The aim is to assess the long-term impact of FWB research and identify the key enablers of research impact and the limitations of the impact assessment exercise. This will inform more comprehensive monitoring of research impact into the future. Methods To assess impact, the study took an implementation science approach, incorporating theory of change and service utilisation frameworks, to create a logic model underpinned by Indigenous research principles. A research impact narrative was developed based on mixed methods analysis of publicly available data on: 1) FWB program participation; 2) research program funding; 3) program outcome evaluation (nine studies); and 4) accounts of research utilisation (seven studies). Results Starting from a need for research on empowerment identified by research users, an investment of $2.3 million in research activities over 23 years produced a range of research outputs that evidenced social and emotional wellbeing benefits arising from participation in the FWB program. Accounts of research utilisation confirmed the role of research outputs in educating participants about the program, and thus, facilitating more demand (and funding acquisition) for FWB. Overall research contributed to 5,405 recorded participants accessing the intervention. The key enablers of research impact were; 1) the research was user- and community-driven; 2) a long-term mutually beneficial partnership between research users and researchers; 3) the creation of a body of knowledge that demonstrated the impact of the FWB intervention via different research methods; 4) the universality of the FWB approach which led to widespread application. Conclusions The FWB research impact exercise reinforced the view that assessing research impact is best approached as a “wicked problem” for which there are no easy fixes. It requires flexible, open-ended, collaborative learning-by-doing approaches to build the evidence base over time. Steps and approaches that research groups might take to build the research impact knowledge base within their disciplines are discussed.

Meaningfulness and Impact of Academic Research: Bringing the Global South to the Forefront

Alongside scholarly and societal dimensions of research impact, the meaningfulness of research, emerging from the link to context, is crucial. Authentic inclusion of Global South scholars based in the Global South aids these objectives.

Framing Studies Evolution in the Social Media Era. Digital Advancement and Reorientation of the Research Agenda

Framing studies remain a powerful line of research in political communication. However, in recent years, coinciding with the emergence of social media, theoretical and operational advances have been detected, as well as a significant reorientation of its research agenda. The interaction between media and platforms such as Twitter or Facebook has built a clearly hybrid communicative environment and profoundly transformed the organization of public debate. This is the case, especially, with processes such as the setting of the public agenda or the construction of interpretive frames. Based on a systematic review of the international reference literature (2011–2021), this article analyses the influence of social media on the evolution of framing studies. Moreover, specifically, the beginning of a new stage of digital development is contextualized, and a triple research impact is explored. The main contributions of the text are that it (1) identifies advances in the theoretical and empirical organization of these studies; (2) explores its reorientation of content towards a greater balance between the analysis of media and political frames; and (3) reviews the recent experimental development of effects studies. Finally, the main challenges for future research in this field are detailed.

Scholar Metrics Scraper (SMS): automated retrieval of citation and author data

Academic departments, research clusters and evaluators analyze author and citation data to measure research impact and to support strategic planning. We created a tool, Scholar Metrics Scraper (SMS), to automate the retrieval of this bibliometric data for our research team. The project contains Jupyter notebooks (publicly-shared here) that take a list of researchers as an input to export a CSV file of citation metrics from Google Scholar and figures to visualize the group's impact. SMS is a scalable, open and publicly-accessible solution for automating the retrieval of citation data over time for a group of researchers.

Understanding the funding characteristics of research impact: A proof-of-concept study linking REF 2014 impact case studies with Researchfish grant agreements

Background: All parts of the research community have an interest in understanding research impact whether that is around the pathways to impact, processes around impact, methods for measurement, describing impact and so on. This proof of concept study explored the relationship between research funding and research impact using the case studies submitted to the UK Research Excellence Framework (REF) exercise in 2014 as a proxy for impact. Methods: The paper describes an approach to link the REF impact case studies with the underpinning research grants present in the Researchfish dataset, primarily using the publications captured in both datasets. Where possible the methodology utilised unique identifiers such as Digital Object Identifiers and PubMed ID’s, and where this was not possible the funding information within each publication was used. Results: Through this automated approach 21% of the non-redacted case studies could be linked to a specific research grant. Additional qualitative analysis was then done for unlinked REF impact case studies, which involved reading the document to identify additional information to make the linkage. This approach was taken on 100 REF impact case studies selected at random and resulted in only seven having no identifiable research grants funding associated. The linked research grants were analysed to identify characteristics that are more frequently associated with these grants, than non-linked ones. Conclusions: This analysis did point to some interesting observations such as the grant funding linked to REF impact case studies are more likely to be longer, higher financial value, have more publications and be more collaborative (amongst other characteristics). These findings should be used with caution at present and not be over interpreted, this is due to the sample size for this proof of concept study and some potential limitations on the data which were not addressed at this stage.

Novel World University Rankings Combining Academic, Environmental and Resource Indicators

World university rankings are regarded as an important tool to assess higher education quality. There are several media sources that publish world university rankings every year. These ranking results are mainly based on academic indicators, including research and teaching, with different weightings. However, some of these academic indicators are questionable, which affects the objectivity of the ranking results. In addition, conducting more medical-related studies could enhance the research impact scores. Some universities that devote themselves to enhancing these academic indicators lose sight of their original development goals and directions. To make the rankings more comprehensive, it is necessary to consider different viewpoints in the assessment. In other words, the research question of this paper is: whether considering different kinds of indicators can provide better ranking results? Therefore, in this paper, we introduce a novel ranking approach that combines academic, environmental, and resource indicators based on the Borda count method. The top 100 world universities from the Academic Ranking of World Universities, QS World University Rankings, Times Higher Education World Universities, and U.S. News & World Report are chosen for the analysis. The comparisons between the original and new rankings show that many universities improve in the rankings, while some universities from particular countries drop in the rankings due to the scores obtained from the environmental and resource indicators.

ODOVTOS-Int. J. Dent. Sc. Research Impact Metrics

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