The Academic Profession in the Age of Impact Evaluation

Research that is highly cited or published in top journals may be good for the academic discipline but not for society. This claim summarizes a key debate in academia, policy, and the public at large on what counts as impactful research. For this, it is important to distinguish between scientific impact, which refers to the intellectual contribution to one’s field of study within academia, and non-scientific impact, which pertains to demonstrable value delivered to society, capturing a change, or a contribution that spans social, economic, cultural, political, environmental, technological or health domains. Despite growing national and global initiatives aimed at broadening conceptions of research impact and ways to evaluate it, their theoretical foundations remain weak. Similarly, empirical gaps persist in relation to how academics demonstrate the non-scientific impact of their research and how impact-based research evaluation is influencing the research practices and career conditions of academics. Accordingly, this project aims to build an integrated theoretical framework for understanding how impact evaluation is influencing the academic profession while also setting a strong empirical foundation using a comparative analysis of three distinct institutional settings.