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Evidence of impact
A crucial part of communicating and tracking impact
When you write about the past impacts of your research, you will need to provide evidence to substantiate your claims. When you design research projects to deliver future impacts, you should embed ways to collect evidence and track those impacts as they occur.
Key takeaways
Substantiate claims about past impacts with evidence
Provide sufficient evidence for each claim, balancing quantity and quality.
Evidence can be quantitative or qualitative
Evidence should be verifiable and ideally publicly available
Read time: 2 min
How much evidence is required?
Evidence is necessary to substantiate:
- Claims about impacts (both academic impacts and real world impacts)
- Claims about reach and significance
- Explanations of how your research led to the impacts – the causal connections.
You only need to provide enough evidence to substantiate a claim. One piece of evidence per claim is a useful rule of thumb.
However, some claims will benefit from more evidence, to drive the point home. A case in point is invited talks as evidence of the scholarly impact of your work on the discipline or field of research. Here, examples of three invited talks would be more compelling than one.
But you certainly don’t need to provide all the evidence on the public record.
What counts as evidence?
Evidence can be quantitative (e.g. statistics) or qualitative (e.g. testimonials). In highly competitive funding schemes such as NHMRC Investigator Grants, quantitative evidence tends to trump qualitative.
Evidence should be verifiable by the reader or assessor. This means it should be publicly available. A testimonial in a private email is not ideal, because no one can check its veracity. (If it’s all you have, you might as well use it anyway; it’s better than nothing.)
Most evidence of impact will come from other people or organisations. In general, your own publications will not provide evidence of impact. The exception is if you have published on the impact of your own research, e.g. a cost-effectiveness analysis of an intervention you implemented.
Examples of evidence of academic impact
- Citation metrics
- Work used in a study by others and referenced
- Evidence of the significance of academic insights/discoveries arising from others’ use of your work
- Major invited presentations arising from work (e.g. keynote)
- Book reviews; book copies sold
- Publication in a prestigious journal
- Prizes, awards (indicating recognition within/beyond field)
- Work editorialised; featured on a cover
- Deposition of data/tools/code in public repository; subsequent use
- Downloads, views, use of tools/data/code.
Example of evidence of real world impact
- Annual reports; white papers; policy documents; clinical guidelines; Hansard; textbooks
- Websites; press releases; community meeting minutes
- Journal articles that describe the real-world impact (e.g. economic analyses)
- Media coverage; Altmetric scores
- Publicly-available data used to determine impact
- Bills Digest; second reading speeches; law reform reports
- Testimonials; surveys; focus groups
- Newsletter mentions/distribution numbers/open rates
- Downloads; usage; website visits.