Digital Science Spotlight Event: What Does Impact Really Mean? #impactspotlight

Join us on the 16th June from 7pm at our London HQ for our second Spotlight event, a free evening of talks around scientific impact, including pizza, wine, beer and nibbles.

While the Impact Factor (IF) is an interesting indicator for scientific impact, journal level stats and looking only at citations gives you a small part of the picture when it comes to dissemination and impact.

As a scientist, should we not be demonstrating success beyond citations or the IF of the journal you published in? What about patient advocate groups, or engineers, or ER doctors? What about policy makers, funders and standards bodies? They don’t cite work but they may read or use it.

Many papers have “impact” in a very real sense that isn’t reflected in the number of citations they then receive. The field of altmetrics, for example, is about looking at a wider variety of indicators – social media, mainstream media, patents, policy documents, download stats, Wikipedia mentions – that relate to a wider variety of outputs – datasets and software as well as papers – to supplement peer review and citations.

The landscape of how science is shared, communicated and then evaluated is changing, so shouldn’t our practices change to support this? What indicators of impact can metrics offer scientists, publishers, institutions and funders, and how can they be applied? 

The aim of this evening will be to look at how academic discourse is changing and to discuss: what does the word impact really mean?

The panel will include:

• Dr. Ben Goldacre, physician, academic and science writer
• Euan Adie, Founder of Altmetric 
• Liz Allen, Head of Evaluation at the Wellcome Trust 
• Jonathan Adams, Chief Scientist, Digital Science (Moderator)

Jonathan will set the scene by talking about the current policy environment, explaining why we are talking about impact and why it has been in the news recently.

Ben will talk about his own experiences of doing both public and policy engagement, for example AllTrials, how he thinks we can collectively do that better, and possible ways of rewarding it and facilitating it.

Liz will talk about how the work The Wellcome Trust is doing around impact and research evaluation, providing a funder’s perspective on these issues.

Euan will talk about the tools, the data and the metrics that help provide insights into the impact of research, in particular exploring the relations between quality, attention and impact.

There will then be a Q&A debate afterwards.

The Twitter hashtag for this event will be #impactspotlight.