Hello everyone,

In this edition, I explore opportunities, resources and reflections on research impact across disciplines. You can access training to support your research impact at different stages, alongside new perspectives on how impact is shaped, assessed and communicated in practice. You will also find a curated selection of articles that engage with current discussions, from creative approaches to case studies to the role of qualitative methods and inclusive knowledge systems.

It's been a busy start to the year for the Fast Track Impact team! I can't wait to share some exciting news with you soon.

Enjoy!

News from Fast Track Impact

FREE FAST TRACK YOUR IMPACT TRAINING COURSE

You can join my most popular impact training course Fast Track Your Research Impact for free on 15 April, from 09:30 to  11:00 UTC. This highly interactive session will give you the opportunity to learn and practice using new tools to time-efficiently increase the significance and reach your impact. Register here.

FREE ONLINE IMPACT TRAINING FOR RESEARCHERS

You can take this free five-week course to help you fast-track the impact of your research, no matter what career stage or discipline you are in. It takes around 10 to 20 minutes to work through the course materials each week over 5 weeks, and anywhere from a couple of minutes to a couple of hours to complete each week's tasks.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: THE FUTURE OF THE IMPACT AGENDA

Watch leading experts discuss the future of the impact agenda, as part of the launch of the Third Edition of The Research Impact Handbook. Fascinating insights from Steven Hill, Emanuela Reale and Gemma Derrick, alongside my own thinking and perspectives from Eric Jensen. We're leading what we hope will be an agenda-setting paper, based on these insights and our discussion.

THE RESEARCH IMPACT HANDBOOK

Get your copy of the third edition of The Research Impact Handbook from Routledge, now updated with new tools, recent case studies and insights from current practice.

Check out our growing catalogue of courses here (worth checking out the new ones if you haven't looked for a while!) and get in touch to set up a call to discuss your needs. 

Research impact news

• I found this interesting blog on leadership for impact by Saskia Walcott. Her perspective focuses more on what's needed in professional services, and complements my own blog series on leading for impact nicely, which was more for academics and senior leaders. Read more here:
  • Part 1: Counter-intuitive leadership goals
  • Part 2: Valuing uncertainty in leadership
  • Part 3: The purpose of an empathic leader
  • Part 4: Bridging expertise - being an expert at finding expertise
  • Part 5: The radical transparency, humility and presence of empathic leaders

• REF impact writing often assumes a neat chain: research → engagement → outcome → impact. Creative practice rarely behaves that way. This new article by Lance Peng from Falmouth University about their experience coordinating REF impact case studies with creative academics shows how they navigated the tensions between bureaucratic templates and socially embedded practice.
  
  
• Here is a useful paper by William Sharkey and colleagues on the value of qualitative approaches to impact evaluation.
  
  

• Research impact is increasingly embedded in EU and global research systems. However, it is often communicated in abstract and bureaucratic language. Anna Przybyło-Józefowicz argues for research impact to be meaningful it needs to be creatively linked to our everyday lives. Read the post on the LSE blog here.
  
  

• This new paper by Karolina Lendák-Kabók et al. examines how early-career researchers in the social sciences understand research impact and how these perceptions change when gender is taken seriously. Based on survey responses from 31 European countries plus South Africa, the authors found that definitions of impact are broadly shared between genders, but the conditions for producing it are not.
  
  

• Finding diverse, context-specific solutions to global problems requires multiple voices, including the knowledge of marginalised groups alongside evidence from research. This systematic review by Ronald Maliao et al. provides new empirical evidence of the "disappearing effect" of gender and geography, which hides traditional/Indigenous knowledge from view in citation networks.
  
  

• A reminder that Eric Jensen’s social research methods textbook, Doing Research in the Real World (6th Ed.), is available. It offers a clear, practice-based introduction to designing and conducting robust research across disciplines. A free preview is available for anyone interested in updating their teaching materials or refining methodological skills.

I hope you've found something useful in this newsletter. If you think others would benefit from future emails, they can subscribe here.

I'll be in touch again next month with another newsletter edition.

Take care till then,

Mark