1. The Impact of the Social Sciences Jane Tinkler @janetinkler

2. The Impact of the Social Sciences project Three-year HEFCE funded project, LSE working with the University of Leeds and Imperial College London. Looked at how academic work had impact on government, business and civil society. Book from the research: Simon Bastow, Patrick Dunleavy and Jane Tinkler (2014) The Impact of the Social Sciences: How academics and their research make a difference. London: Sage. Have just spent a year working in Parliament to see how closely trying to achieve impact in reality matched the theory!

3. 1. What did our research show – on the value of the social sciences?

4. Value of mediation of social science in the UK £24.2bn Indirect & induced value £4.8bn University spending £2.7bn External mediators 410k 625k students 35k academics Research funded £851m Research staff 32k Economic value People value

5. Social science research is systematically used by government

6. Core social science disciplines are used at both national and international levels

7. We found a similar picture for civil society

8. 2. What did our research show – on how we create impactful research?

9. 2. Connecting with an external organization 3. Identifying a quid pro quo in applying research 5. Building and extending a relationship 4. Finding traction for applying research within the organization 6. Demonstrating specific benefits to the organization 1. Identifying potentially interested external organizations The six stages of building relationships with external stakeholders

10. 1 & 2 Identifying potentially interested external organizations And Connecting with these organizations 3 Identifying a ‘quid pro quo’ in applying research 4 Finding traction for applying research within the organization 5 Building and extending the relationship 6 Demonstrating specific impacts or benefits to the organization Private sector firms and business Government & public sector Civil society & Third sector High Low Level of difficulty Crunch points in the impact process vary for different sectors

11. Collaborative research tends to get more citations Most outputs in our dataset were single authored, but more cites went to outputs that had at least one other author

12. We are seeing increasing international co- authorship

13. Comparing academic and external citations shows interesting differences between disciplines

14. 3. What did our research show – about how our work is translated and mediated?

15. There are lots of people who use academic research in their roles in government, business, civil society

16. But the reality for users trying to find research is...

17. A key problem for the social sciences is the relative lack of ‘mediating middle’ that builds long-term links and identifies impacts

18. Increasing open access publishing in the UK

19. Journalists are key mediators of academic work for policymakers

20. Academics doing their own translating – via academic blogging

21. And sharing publications via social media

22. 4. Top tips for creating impact!

23. Top tips for increasing impact on academic colleagues Pick as distinctive a version of your author name as possible and stick with it Write informative article titles, abstracts and book blurbs so that your work is findable Work with colleagues to produce multi-authored outputs Consider cross-disciplinary research projects Build communication and dissemination plans into research projects early on Use online and social media tools to share your work to academic networks

24. Top tips for increasing impacts on external research users Think about what you research, how it might be relevant to policymakers, and therefore what types of outputs you produce. Think about how you interact with intermediary organisations and research users. Make full use of your university’s resources (like online depositories, Expert directories, knowledge transfer schemes). And networking opportunities like conferences, fellowships and submit evidence. Create an ‘impact file’ to collect information on all your external interactions: meetings with people at seminars, email exchanges etc. can all be useful to build an impact profile

25. Natural Systems (e.g. astrophysics, pure maths) Human-influenced Systems (e.g. climate change) Human-dominated systems (e.g. cities, markets, information systems) SOCIAL SCIENCES And their integrative role. Big research challenges involve ‘human-influenced’ and ‘human-dominated’ systems We did the thing that social science does best, right? Which is not to answer a particular question, but to change the way in which people think about what the questions are. We can start to answer the big and deep questions that sociologists ask but with statistical rigour of large datasets from computer science. I think a lot of this is about finding a commonality of language which doesn’t exist today.

26. Further information The Impact of the Social Sciences blog shares good practice from the research community on key topics of interest.Impact of the Social Sciences It has links to two guides that are freely available: Downloadable chapter from the book A handbook on maximising your own impact A guide to using twitter for academics Twitter: @lseimpactblog Facebook: Impact of Social Sciences