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Research impact and contributions to the field

Writer's picture: Dr Liz SchierDr Liz Schier

Updated: Oct 4, 2024

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


One thing I like about the advice not to describe the significance of your research outputs is that it hints at an important fact – that citations are an indirect measure of significance and impact.
Don’t get me wrong – I am not saying that citations are irrelevant. Given a choice you want your work to have 1000 citations, not 10.

Rather my point is that not all citations are created equal. Two papers with equally high citation metrics may not have made equally important contributions to the field.
As an extreme example think about the research paper which supposedly showed an association between vaccinations and the onset of Autism Spectrum Disorder. It has respectable citation and attention metrics. But it included falsified data. It didn’t advance knowledge. Instead it led to a lot of unnecessary research attempting to show it was wrong and it had a negative impact beyond academia, fuelling opposition to vaccination.

To take a less extreme example think of the opening paragraphs of a paper where the authors are indicating that they are on top of the most recent developments in the field. Being cited in this context isn’t necessarily a sign that your research has had an impact – it is more like a demonstration that the authors have done their homework.

High impact work is genuinely engaged with. Researchers read it and springboard from it, using it to shape their own research. Whether they agree or disagree, what you have shown heavily influences what they do. If your approach has become the standard, if researchers have built on your initial findings to develop more detailed accounts or if they have taken your methods and applied them to a new area you won't be mentioned in passing. Instead the discussion in the text around the citation of your research will show a genuine engagement with your ideas.

Because not all citations are created equal you need to read the works that cite you! I have often done this with applicants and they have been pleasantly surprised to see how others have used their research in entirely different fields. In other cases applicants have found that their research with relatively few citations was cited, endorsed and used by a famous researcher in their field and that the famous researcher’s paper then went on to have significant impact. If your ideas were the basis of someone else’s impactful research than their impact is your impact. So before starting to write about your research impact do your homework and read the papers that cite you and even the papers that cite the papers that cite you.

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