Social sciences and humanities researchers continue to struggle with promoting impact despite years of discussions, a conference in Athens has heard.
The Achieving Impact conference, held in Athens on 26 and 27 February and organised by the network of national contact points for the social sciences and humanities, Net4Society, aimed to provide researchers with practical advice on how to incorporate the idea of impact into proposals for Horizon 2020.
Ahead of the programme’s launch, social scientists and humanities researchers lobbied successfully for the European Commission to increase the number of calls in which they could participate. But there continues to be far more discussion—and confusion—around impact in the social sciences than in other fields.
Conference participants said a major problem was a reluctance among researchers to sell themselves and their work. “Researchers can be their own worst enemy,” said Maria O’Brien, a national contact point for social sciences and humanities research in Ireland. “We need to take ourselves and our impact seriously, and once we do we can convince colleagues.”
Some researchers are hostile to the idea of impact, thinking of it as too closely aligned to politics or something “dirty” to be kept separate from their work, one participant told Research Europe.
Cultural and language differences between member states make identifying potential impact and the people who will benefit more difficult, participants said, which in turn hampers proposal writing. “Not all European societies are equal,” said Nikos Demertzis, president of the Greek National Centre for Social Research. “Sometimes it is difficult for an applicant to combine European research priorities with local needs.”
Attendants remained sceptical about the Commission’s aim to boost multidisciplinary research across Horizon 2020. Some programmes do not make space for ethical or conceptual analysis, where social scientists could make a valuable contribution, they said.
However, Eva Hoogland, senior scientific officer at Science Europe, an association of national research funders and organisations, said academia was “not an innocent victim”. Institutions use bibliometrics and ranking systems against each other and treat peer review “as a gatekeeper to keep out ideas people don’t like”, which can deplete impact, she said.
Alice Dijkstra, senior humanities programme officer at the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, stressed that social scientists should not complain about a lack of funding while they don’t join expert and advisory panels. She urged participants to get involved as soon as possible.