The Emerging Impact Landscape

21 May 2019 by Leave a comment

wade kelly - 150x150Wade Kelly is the Senior Coordinator, Research Impact, at La Trobe University, in Melbourne, Australia.

Wade’s PhD research focused on how and why universities and academics engage with communities.

This is Wade’s personal website and he tweets from @wadekelly.

White Night Melbourne 2018 | Photo by Wade Kelly Shared via Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).

White Night Melbourne 2018 | Photo by Wade Kelly | Shared via Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).

There’s considerable confusion about what ‘impact’ is, and this is no surprise given that it’s a term that’s used for so many things in the contemporary research space.

For my research, I’ve had many, many conversations with people across higher education in Australia and Canada at all career levels (research higher degree students, Early Career Researchers, Mid Career Researchers).  Alongside the confusion about what impact is is what impact means (and will mean) to academics.

The following primer is a brief history of the impact landscape, an exploration of some of the trends in higher education, and some things to consider as you start your ‘impact journey.’

So, let’s start by clarifying some of the many meanings of impact. I find it easiest to consider impact as happening either inside (internal) or outside (external) of academia. Read more of this post

Filed under Research communication, Research culture Tagged with , , ,

I’m new

14 May 2019 by 23 Comments

Photo by Aftab Uzzaman | http://www.flickr.com/photos/aftab

I’ve recently started at a new university. This is a good thing. It was time that I moved on, and I’m going to learn a huge amount in my new role. My new manager is amazing, and the team are excellent.

However, it is also a little bit odd. I’ve gone from being the person who knows everything to the person who knows nothing. Literally, nothing. Someone had to show me how to book a room. I don’t know how the systems work. I don’t know how finance works. I don’t know how HR works. I didn’t even know how the microwave worked (sorted this one out by myself, thankfully).

Some of these (photocopier, microwave) are mundane things, to be expected with a new environment. Some are a result of moving organisations – each university has its own way of doing things. In my old role, if I didn’t know how something worked, at least I knew who to ask. In my new role, I know almost no one. In one stroke, I’ve left behind a network that I’d built up over years. I have to build a whole new network (and I’m pretty terrible at the ‘names and faces’ thing).

Because of this, I’m keen to impress. There is so much that I don’t know, I’m trying extra hard when I do know something. I’m that kid in the class with their hand in the air, “Pick me, pick me!”. So keen to impress. So desperately keen. So desperate. Read more of this post

Filed under Research culture, Research life Tagged with , ,

The gendered impacts of funding Australia’s research

16 April 2019 by 5 Comments

Janine Pickering is a senior consultant for CIS Consulting and Implementation Services. She works with individuals, teams, and organisations to design and implement positive workplace change.

Her passion lies at the interface of industry and academia where innovation thrives. So, it was a natural next step to include the role of ‘pracademic’ in her career portfolio. In this, she combines her consulting expertise with part-time lecturing/tutoring and research at Swinburne University. Her PhD is in Economic Sociology, with research interests in gender, work and organisations. She can be contacted via LinkedIn.

Mind the Gap goes feminist! by London Student Feminists [CC BY-SA 3.0]

Mind the Gap goes feminist! by London Student Feminists [CC BY-SA 3.0]

I have a bee in my bonnet about the impact of grant funding on women’s research careers so, last year, I made a submission to the Senate Inquiry into Funding Australia’s Research.

Although gender equity was not the main focus of the Inquiry, it is a crucial issue for productivity in research, hence several submissions raised it. The submission from the Australian Academy of Science EMCR Forum, for example, highlighted the significant disadvantages to women and minorities in the competitive funding process due to systemic biases and poor evaluation of track record relative to opportunity.

On reading the final report (722 Kb PDF), it was apparent that most of the Inquiry submissions as well as the Committee’s recommendations were focused on iterative changes to the current system, not a complete overhaul. However, based on my PhD research (2010 – 2015) into gender dynamics in biotech organisations (2.27 Mb PDF), I believe a tweaking of the current funding system will have only minimal impact on the outcomes for women in research and, consequently, on research productivity. My research was specific to science but I expect is equally relevant to the humanities and other areas.

I compared the career outcomes of women and men in biotechnology. A major finding was that women are more likely to become managers in commercial biotech firms than in public research organisations and, when they do, they hold management roles with relatively similar responsibilities and pay to men. In contrast, in public research organisations such as universities and research institutes, women who become managers tend to congregate in lower level management positions. Read more of this post

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Which academics are happy?

26 March 2019 by 1 Comment

Lachlan Smith is Co-Director of Cloud Chamber.

He supports small and specialist institutions to develop their research culture, environment and income through strategy development and one to one research proposal support for academics. Clients include Newman, Leeds Trinity and Harper Adams Universities. He previously worked in research development at the University of Warwick as well as roles in the civil service, local government and economic development consultancy.

Lachlan is currently undertaking a part-time PhD at the School of Business, University of Leicester. He tweets from @HEresearchfund.

Academics everywhere are under increasing pressure to improve their performance and that of their institution, often by undertaking tasks that respond directly to new forms of measurement and management within the sector.

Image by rromer on flickr | Shared via CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Image by rromer on flickr | Shared via CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

League tables now exist for every imaginable university degree, region and specialism and the plethora of tables continue to grow.

Over the last eight years, since I started working closely with academics, the number of metrics has only continued to expand, prompting the question from an academic I know well: “Which academics are actually happy in English higher education today?”

The question took me by surprise. I had never been asked this question so directly before.

This academic had recently taken the plunge and resigned from her academic role in England and taken up opportunities in South-East Asia. Part of the driver for this was unhappiness with the English higher education sector, including heavy (and often unrealistic) teaching loads, burdensome administration and a lack of support from senior management, coupled with the introduction of more metrics into the everyday life of academics. These include the Research Excellence Framework (REF), Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) and the associated National Student Survey (NSS). And, of course, there is the newly emerging Knowledge Exchange Framework (KEF), as well as a reduction in student fees potentially on the horizon to complicate the policy and organisational landscape further.

It is a pretty exhausting mix for anyone, and that’s just thinking about it, let alone doing any of this. How, for example, do people manage to do research – that key underpinning platform of universities? Read more of this post

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preLights: A new way to share research?

12 March 2019 by Leave a comment

Máté Pálfy is the Community Manager for preLights, a preprint highlighting service that was launched a year ago by the not-for-profit publisher The Company of Biologists.

Before taking up this role, Máté did his PhD at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, studying gene regulation using zebrafish embryos. He is a big supporter of open science and is excited to see how preprints will shape the future of publishing. Máté tweets from @mate_palfy and you can follow preLights @preLights. 

The Research Whisperer was very interested to hear more about preLights because we’re always up for different ways of sharing research, and this model appears to benefit the researchers, our scholarly communities, and the research itself. That’s winning all around!

While preLights is focused on the biological sciences, the potential for its format extends much further than this area.   

preLights 1st birthday cake! Photo from Mate Palfy.

preLights 1st birthday cake! Photo from Máté Pálfy.

When I was a PhD student, one of my favourite things to do was to discuss the latest experiments and results related to my research, and exchange views on where the field was heading.

I particularly enjoyed poster sessions at conferences, where early career researchers can easily engage with more established scientists and discuss unpublished, ‘raw’ science.

In many aspects, preprints (non-reviewed versions of manuscripts deposited on a public server) can be viewed as similar to unpublished research presented at conferences and other meetings. They facilitate collaboration and open discussions about the work, but are much more transparent than conference talks or posters, as the details of the work are better documented. Given these advantages (along with a number of others, discussed here), you might think that researchers would’ve already made the public discussion of preprints part of their routine. Unfortunately, this hasn’t really been the case. Read more of this post

Filed under Building your track-record, Networking, Research culture Tagged with , , , , , ,

Drop around for a visit

26 February 2019 by 1 Comment

This article is based on material that I wrote in 1994, when working with Margaret Jackson and Rosemary O’Connor on a project related to encouraging research in disciplines that were not traditionally considered strong in research. It originally appeared in Margaret Jackson and Rosemary O’Connor. 1994, ‘Developing Academic Research Performance’. Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Melbourne, Australia.

Urbex image of an old and abandoned desk, with a bright orange chair behind it. On the wall is graffiti - TSJ
Beauty in decay #10, by Jinterwas, on Flickr.

Having someone come to visit is always nice. Unless they arrive unannounced, or stay too long, or too many people come at once, or… actually, there are a myriad of things that can go wrong with visitors.

Visiting researchers can be like that, too: a great boon to a research group when the visit is well planned, a special kind of hell for the guest when it isn’t.

Visits are usually initiated by individual staff members, based on their personal connections. However, the organisational support for the visit is generally provided by a research centre or group. They take a bit of work to organise, so it’s worth it to put in the planning time to make the visit a success.

How do you plan for a visiting scholar?

Well, if you were visiting, how would you want things to be organised? Thinking about the visit from the visitor’s point of view can help you to:

  • Clarify the purpose of the visit and set realistic expectations.
  • Understand the logistics and funding required to get a visitor to your campus.
  • Plan the actual visit, including a welcome kit for your visitor.

As a visitor, you would probably want to know why you are being invited to visit. This is often assumed and unstated, which can lead to mixed expectations. Read more of this post

Filed under Be strategic, Research culture Tagged with , ,

Feedback and me

19 February 2019 by 12 Comments

Photo by Charles Deluvio | unsplash.com

Photo by Charles Deluvio | unsplash.com

I have a troubled relationship with feedback.

It has been this way for many years, from my days as a PhD researcher in literary studies (where someone has literally fallen asleep in front of me while I was tutoring) to disjointed gigs as a guest lecturer and convenor where my contact with the student cohort was minimal and very episodic.

These days, I teach classes, convene intensives, and run multi-part programs all the time. And I must evaluate them constantly.

I’ve recently had a revelation that you should feel free to roll your eyes at: getting feedback is meant to be helpful, not harmful.

Let me sketch what’s happened a bit more.

One of the final things I had to do last year was convene three days of researcher intensives – two days for the Early Career Researchers and one for the Mid Career Researchers. It happened in the first week of December and I spent my last working week in 2018 following up properly with materials and links, and clearing urgent backlogged tasks. Never has a week appeared so short!

The theme was ‘engagement and impact’. This was not surprising seeing as ‘engagement and impact’ are the Sonny and Cher of Australian and UK higher education research circles in recent years. I invited Tamika Heiden of KT Australia to run a couple of workshops for us and it was great to have a Research Whisperer buddy come to play at my institution.

I also had the benefit of great chats with Tamika during those days. One of the things we discussed was the way we solicit and act on feedback. Read more of this post

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