It’s almost impossible to pursue research impact while building an academic career, says Marta Wróblewska
In the past decade, research impact has become one of the pillars of academic achievement—and assessment. First evaluated on a national scale in the 2014 UK Research Excellence Framework, it has since become a part of many other countries’ national research assessments, including Italy, the Netherlands, Norway and Poland, as well as a feature of EU funding decisions.
Academics’ initial suspicion towards this new element of evaluation has morphed into (sometimes grudging) acceptance. But one group of scholars is struggling with the idea of research impact: early career researchers.
In a recent paper, my colleagues and I surveyed more than 100 ECRs working in 29 mainly European countries on their attitudes towards research impact as a criterion of academic evaluation. We found that while pursuing impact—broadly defined as a ‘civic duty’ and ‘giving something back’—aligns with young scholars’ personal values, it often generates tensions when planning a career in academia.
While established scholars are warming to the idea of periodic reviews of academia’s influence on society, younger researchers often have to choose between pursing scholarly excellence and societal impact.
As it stands, the impact agenda poses ECRs a dilemma between their personal desire to have a positive effect beyond academia, and the requirements of a research career. One of our respondents described impact as “important, but impossible”.
As academic employment becomes increasingly precarious and its demands more exorbitant, many ECRs find even the entry-level threshold for full-time jobs impossible to meet.
Faced with punishing workloads related to teaching, lab work, authoring publications and applying for grants, young scholars often see pursuing impact beyond academia as an extra burden, and one they are unlikely to be rewarded for.
Low priority
The researchers we surveyed reported that their employers do not generally see creating impact as part of an ECR’s role or profile.
Not surprisingly, the researchers themselves see it as an extra—something they would like to work towards, but coming at the end of a list of priorities headed by publishing papers. Those who do pursue impact feel that they do it off their own bat, without any institutional reward.
Our results show that the culture of publish-or-perish is alive and well among the younger generation of scholars.
A focus on publications might seem overly cautious, given impact’s growing status as an evaluation criterion in both national and international evaluation exercises. Impact’s position in the goals of research, however, remains shallow and uncertain.
In Poland, for example, although impact makes up 20 per cent of the weight of the national research evaluation, it is still seen as a relative novelty, potentially subject to evaluators’ whims and thus not a safe bet. In Italy, impact makes up just 5 per cent of the evaluation—so it’s unlikely to tip the scales.
Impact’s evolving position means that ECRs cannot be sure if and to what degree efforts to engage beyond the ivory tower will be recognised. As these researchers are extremely mobile, frequently moving between postdocs and countries, they are often confused as to the value of impact in the system in which they will, with luck, settle into tenure-track jobs.
A final challenge to engaging in creating impact as an ECR is impostor syndrome. Even though they are educated to stellar levels and often have years of experience in academia and beyond, many of our respondents reported feelings of insecurity when it comes to engaging with potential users of their research.
This is partly owing to ECRs’ international mobility and the difficulty of building new networks every few years. But it also speaks to the relatively slow career progress in academia. Four years working in a company can be enough to reach a mid-level or even senior position. After four years in academia, a person will only be completing their PhD, and considered still in training.
Engaged institutions
Extra-academic impact should be an integral part of researchers’ professional ethos, not an optional extra with more risks than opportunities.
To help ECRs match their personal desire to create impact with their career demands, institutions should recognise impact-related achievements in recruitment and promotion criteria, and offer more flexibility when it comes to allocation of a scholar’s work time.
Finally, we need champions who will guide ECRs through the tough phase of carving out one’s niche in academia so that it contains space for engagement and impact.
Marta Wróblewska is in the Institute of Humanities at the SWPS University, Warsaw
This article also appeared in Research Europe