In the Research Opportunities and Performance Evidence (ROPE) section ‘Evidence of the participant’s research impact and contributions to the field, including those most relevant to this application’ you are asked to outline your research impact and significant contributions to the field and to describe how your research has led to a significant change or advance of knowledge, but you are also told not to describe the significance of your research outputs.
How can you talk about the significance of your research without talking about the significance of your outputs?
The key is to think about the content of your research and not how you divided it up into publications.
We suggest you start by describing the state of play before you did your research. What did we know? What didn’t we know? What couldn’t we do? Why was this a significant problem?
Then think about what your research showed. Did you answer a previously unanswerable question? How? Did you develop new experimental techniques? Did you have to conceptualise the problem in a different way?
Next you want to think about how your research had an impact on knowledge.
How have other researchers used your research? Has your approach become the standard? Have they built on your initial findings to develop more detailed accounts? Have they taken your methods and applied them to a new area?
Finally, you want to talk about the impact your research has had outside academia.
Did your new intervention improve health outcomes? Did your policy interventions lead to law reform? Did your fundamental discovery change public perception? Perhaps your new technology was licenced by a company which has brought your discovery to market.
Significance and citations
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