No matter what type of research you do, communicating its impact is a vital skill – whether you’re applying for a promotion or a grant, or talking to journalists or the public.
Read time: 5 min
You’ll need to write about your track record of research impact in funding applications, promotion applications, prize nominations, and more. Common examples include the ARC ‘ROPE’ and NHMRC ‘Research Impact’ grant and fellowship track record sections.
You might need to write about your work’s impact within academia (e.g. benefits for the field), beyond academia (real-world benefits), or both.
Depending on the context, you might have as little as a paragraph or more than a page. There is no one way to write about impact, and you’ll need to adapt to the context and the audience.
Well-written impact statements contain three key elements. These elements apply regardless of the format in which you’re writing, and whether you’re writing about impact beyond or within academia.
Impact is the demonstrable benefit of your research and its activities. When writing about the impact of your research, you need to specifically describe how it has been taken up and any benefit(s) that have followed. In particular, you should clearly explain the significance and reach of these benefits. Try to quantify these where possible.
Remember to consider and communicate:
Powerful impact narratives demonstrate a causal link between your research and the impact. This is sometimes called ‘attribution’. You can show that your work was responsible for the impact by highlighting the causal links along the impact pathway. For example, a new technology resulted in a partnership with a company, which resulted in the real-world rollout of the technology, which resulted in downstream real-world benefits.
It’s common that your work won’t be wholly responsible for the impact. In this case, try to define the specific contribution your work made and ideally show that it was pivotal to the impact.
Other types of academic writing use evidence to support arguments, and writing about impact is no different.
Draw on corroborating evidence to give your story credibility and rigour. Provide evidence for the significance and reach of the impact and the causality between your research and the impact. How can you prove your claims?
Select the most reputable and verifiable evidence you can. Can you point to publicly-available information, documents, policy reports, white papers, statistics, or perhaps survey results or a reputable testimonial?
If you’re specifically required to write about real-world impact beyond academia, don’t make the mistake of writing about your impact within academia (i.e. on the field). And when you’re asked to write about your track record of achievement in research impact, be sure not to focus on hypothetical impact that might occur in the future. Track record deals with retrospective impact, not prospective impact.
Making claims or emphatic statements without objective evidence reduces believability. For example, “this work has had clear benefits for the Australian economy” sounds dubious without explaining what those benefits are and citing an economic analysis or other evidence.
Vague statements like “this work has changed practice in hospitals”, aren’t specific enough about the reach or significance. It would be more powerful to quantify, and say the findings have “changed practice in four hospitals across the Sydney Local Health District, as evidenced by…”. Or, instead of “this work received media coverage”, you could say “this work was featured in international news outlets, including ABC, BBC, and Sky News”.
Vague language like “my research contributed to/helped/was part of…[some kind of impact]” can sound unconvincing. We can’t know if your work made a major or a negligible contribution to the impact and so we can’t be confident of causality. Instead, use direct language like “the research I led resulted in/was responsible for/was cited as key evidence in…”.
Don’t waste precious space with lengthy descriptions of extraneous information such as methodological details or extensive background. Be concise where you can, and impact should be the focus – not an afterthought.
Assessors of impact won't usually be experts in your particular niche research area. Make your writing easy to read by: (1) Using subheadings to provide structure and signposting, (2) Avoiding unnecessary jargon and too many acronyms, (3) Considering that experts in other fields may be using the same phrases or words, but in different ways to your field.
Primary school bullying is a key risk factor in childhood anxiety and disengagement from education. My team developed a novel anti-bullying intervention that is based on Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction techniques. It was tested in a randomised controlled trial of 300 Year 1-5 primary school teachers. This research helped contribute to a 50% reduction in the number of bullying incidents in schools relative to 2015, which is the single biggest reduction in bullying since records began.
This example does successfully states the significance of the impact: a 50% reduction in bullying. However, it could be improved in a few ways:
Here is one way the author could have rewritten the paragraph to improve the communication of impact:
“Primary school bullying is a key risk factor in childhood anxiety and disengagement from education. My team developed a novel anti-bullying intervention that is based on Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction techniques. More than 200 teachers have been trained in the intervention through an ARC-funded partnership with the NSW Department of Education, and it is now being used in 120 schools across the state. Bullying has halved across these sites since its implementation, which is the single biggest reduction since records began (Bullying: How far have we come?, 2020, p. 25)”.
My novel imaging protocols identified brain changes associated with Alzheimer’s disease 5 years before the onset of clinical symptoms. It was published in Nature Neuroscience, which has an Impact Factor of 20. The article has received 276 citations (Scopus), lying in the 70th percentile for citations and giving a FWCI of 5.0. It has been cited by groups from 10 countries (SciVal). It was the most-viewed article in December 2017, and it has received 130 Twitter mentions and has Altmetric score of 21, putting it in the 85th percentile. This work was awarded an Australian Museum Eureka Prize (2019).
There are many things wrong with this paragraph as an explanation of impact! To improve it the author should:
In partnership with the Chau Chak Wing Museum, I created a database of Indigenous Australian art works from 1935-1975 which has been made available on the Museum website. The accessible, digital repository of Indigenous art works had helped contribute to academic, public and international understanding of Indigenous Australian art practice over this period. This database has been accessed by researchers in art history and museum studies, teachers and school students, commercial and public galleries, and scholars of indigenous culture.
This example displays a couple of the common writing errors:
