Scoping Impact: Mapping, Evaluating and Learning from Contemporary Trends in Research Impact Definition

The aim of this project is to provide a state-of-the-art survey of contemporary trends in how research impact is defined in the social sciences, with an emphasis on defining economic impacts. We will collate publicly available information and analyse how funders in different organisations and countries have established and modified their impact frameworks over the past 10 years. We will use this information to categorise, systematically organise, and summarise (including by presenting the findings in tabular form) the key features of current impact typologies, frameworks and emergent developments. Our categorisations will be informed by academic literature on how impact is conceptualised, including its timescales, assumed causal mechanisms, and how it is distinguished from public engagement (among other characteristics).

This information gathering and organization will allow us to discern: (1) how definitions of research impact are converging and diverging both at a national and international level, and along which axes; (2) emerging cross-disciplinary standards; (3) to what extent existing ESRC definitions align with those of comparator research funders; (4) emerging typologies of forms of impact and conceptualisations of the domains in which they have effects; (5) how funders are responding to methodological and technological advances; and (6) how economic impacts, primary and secondary, are defined and conceptualised across our sample of funding bodies. As well as collating and presenting this information, we will evaluate developments in the international space informed by a decade of academic debates about the promises and perils of defining research impact in the social sciences. This work will result in a report that provides an authoritative summary of the academic and policy literature state of-the-art, as well as recommendations for future ESRC definitions and practice drawing on our findings and judgements about emerging best practices internationally.