Understanding impact requires measurements, not narratives

There are better ways than just-so stories to assess how research influences society, argues Hanan Khazragui.

Measuring research impact is necessary for two reasons. First, at a time of economic hardship, governments require all forms of expenditure to be justified. Second, and perhaps more importantly, unless we can measure impact it will be difficult to allocate public money for research in a way that maximises the benefit to society.

Everyone seems to be pretty happy with how impact assessment turned out in the 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF). Both the big research-intensive universities and the smaller, specialist institutions performed well. Fears that trying to measure economic and societal impacts would lead to homogenisation and impact-chasing at the expense of basic research seem to have been allayed.