Research Impact

Abstract This chapter aims to explore ways of addressing the goals of ‘university
social responsibility’ through research activities. It develops the argument that
research can play a dual role in producing findings which are beneficial to society
but which also empower individuals and local communities through their direct
involvement in the research process. The chapter starts with setting out how the
University of Manchester defines and approaches ‘social responsibility’. Second, it
presents a research project which illustrates this approach. The study has been
identified by the World Health Organization (WHO) as a best practice example of
involving older people as co-investigators in researching and developing what it
terms ‘age-friendly’ cities. The chapter then discusses the objectives of the study,
the process of involving and training older people to become co-researchers, the
research outcomes, and the impact of the research. Finally, the chapter concludes
with a discussion of the lessons learned from the project, and suggests ways forward
for (re-) connecting research with the goal of social responsibility.

This Impact Report identifies and summarises the diverse impacts, resulting from the £500m of UK funding of Science and Technology in 2013, using numerous quantitative metrics and short case study extracts.  It shows how the varied impacts of a national science and technology organization and its many funded programmes can be annually identified, captured, tracked, and summarised in a public document.

The report was produced for, and by, the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) -  the UK Research Council responsible for funding: (1) all UK astronomy, particle and nuclear physics research, (2) related UK science and technology facilities (e.g. as Harwell and Daresbury), (3) the UK contribution to international science (e.g. CERN, international telescopes and space missions), (4) innovation and business spin-off programmes, and (5) UK public engagement activities.

The Report was co-researched and co-authored by the STFC Impact Team, including myself while Impact Evaluation Manager in 2013, with Dr. Claire Dougan-McCallie (lead author/Head of Impact) and Jenny Beard, with additional input from senior managers, and many data and case study contributions from other key managers across STFC.

Varied key impacts are identified and reported including:

• Research amongst the best (by citation impact) in astronomy, nuclear and particle physics.
• Supported research of 226 Principal Investigators in 70 universities, led to 1,100 peer-reviewed papers in 2012.
• Facilities (the Diamond Light Source, ISIS and CLF) were used in 2012/13 by over 4,200 unique users , in over 2,400 experiments, producing over 1,000 papers in peer-reviewed journals.

• Technology from CERN benefited the UK economy by over £100 billion every year.
• Funding the development of the UK’s space, internet and computer animation industries, returned over £500 billion to the UK economy per annum.
• Funded Innovation Campuses hosted over 230 enterprises and supported over 5,000 jobs.
• UK industry won £43 million in contracts from the international subscriptions funded, and had accumulated a total of £150 million since 2005.

• Funded research inspired future generations to study STEM subjects, attracting 90% of UK undergraduates to study physics, funded 782 PhD students  and 16,800 student training days.
• Between 2009 to 2012 public engagement programmes engaged people on 58 million occasions, with 2 million people engaged in face-to-face activities in 2013 alone.

Little detailed information is known about who reads research articles and the contexts in which research articles are read. Using data about people who register in Mendeley as readers of articles, this paper explores different types of users of Clinical Medicine, Engineering and Technology, Social Science, Physics and Chemistry papers inside and outside academia. The majority of readers for all disciplines were PhD students, postgraduates and postdocs but other types of academics were also represented. In addition, many Clinical Medicine papers were read by medical professionals. The highest correlations between citations and Mendeley readership counts were found for types of users that often authored academic papers, except for associate professors in some sub-disciplines. This suggests that Mendeley readership can reflect usage similar to traditional citation impact, if the data is restricted to readers who are also authors, without the delay of impact measured by citation counts. At the same time, Mendeley statistics can also reveal the hidden impact of some research papers, such as educational value for non-author users inside academia or the impact of research papers on practice for readers outside academia.

Reading academic publications is a key scholarly activity. Scholars accessing and recording academic publications online are producing new types of readership data. These include publisher, repository, and academic social network download statistics as well as online reference manager records. This chapter discusses the use of download and reference manager data for research evaluation and library collection development. The focus is on the validity and application of readership data as an impact indicator for academic publications across different disciplines. Mendeley is particularly promising in this regard, although all data sources are not subjected to rigorous quality control and can be manipulated.

Bibliometrics can be defined as the statistical analysis of publications. Bibliometrics has focused on the quantitative analysis of citations and citation counts which is complex. It is so complex and specialized that personal knowledge and experience are insufficient for understanding trends and then making decisions. We need tools for analysis of bibliometrics information to recognize the research trends and evaluate scientific/institution/country’s research productivity.  This presentation will provide procedure to write a Bibliometrics paper.

The number of citations a paper receives helps to determine the impact of your research. Even if your research is excellent, if no one finds your paper, it won’t be cited. Similar to a company for marketing a retail product, Academic Search Engine Optimization (ASEO) of your journal papers is important to market your research findings. ASEO is almost obligatory if you would like to increase readership of your papers, increase citations and acknowledgment and to create an overall stronger academic visibility, both offline and online. By optimizing your articles, you guarantee that your articles are indexed and gain a higher ranking in general and academic search engines, such as Google Scholar. In order to increase the article visibility and citations, this presentation provides guidelines on how to optimize scholarly literature for academic search engines like Google Scholar.

Although more than a million academic papers have been posted on Facebook, there is little detailed research about which fields or cross-field issues are involved and whether there are field or public interest relationships between Facebook mentions and future citations. In response, we identified health and biomedical scientific papers mentioned on Facebook and assigned subjects to them using the MeSH and Science Metrix journal classification schema. Multistage adaptive LASSO and unpenalized least-squares regressions were used to model Facebook mentions by fields and MeSH terms. The fields Science and Technology, General and Internal Medicine, Complementary and Alternative Medicine, and Sport Sciences produced higher Facebook mention counts than average. However, no MeSH cross-field issue differences were found in the rate of attracting Facebook mentions. The relationship between Facebook mentions and citations varies between both fields and MeSH cross-field issues. General and Internal Medicine, Cardiovascular System and Hematology and Developmental Biology have strongest correlations between Facebook mentions and citations, probably due to high citation rates and high Facebook visibility in these areas. **This is a preprint of an article to be published in the Information Processing and Management© copyright 2020 Elsevier. 2

Do you know “Over 43% of ISI papers have never ever received any citations?” (nature.com/top100, 2014). Now it’s time to start spreading the word around your findings and analysis. Publishing a high quality paper in scientific journals is only halfway towards receiving citation in the future. The rest of the journey is dependent on disseminating the publications via using the proper “Research Tools”. Proper utilization of the tools allows the researchers to increase the research impact and citations for their publications. This workshop will provide you various techniques on how you can increase the visibility and hence the impact of your research work.

Consultation is an important feature of research and, increasingly, researchers are required to work in partnership with stakeholders to increase the impact of their work. Our aim is to demonstrate what can be learned from the scholarship on, and practice of, member checking to facilitate productive knowledge exchange. Using dialogical analysis we explore three member check interactions from three different qualitative psychology projects focusing our analysis on difficult moments between researchers and participants conceptualised here as ‘sore spots’. We identify two major genres in these sequences: participant ambivalence and participant challenge. We then consider passages that allow us to explore a more theoretical understanding of these two genres in terms of the metaphor of portraits and mirrors. Overall, we outline how implicit epistemologies and theories of subjectivity (uncomplicated, blank, and complex) may be linked to the way in which stakeholders approach research. We also provide a map with regard to the theories within which member checks can be undertaken, associated research practices in terms of a range of researcher responses to stakeholder ambivalence and challenge, and implications of these moments for knowledge exchange for qualitative research but also for psychological science as a whole. We conclude that sore spots in knowledge exchange process can be productive opportunities of transformational validity.

Keywords: member check; knowledge exchange; research impact; dialogical analysis; participant validation

Policymaking is rarely 'evidence-based'. Rather, policy can only be strongly evidence-informed if its advocates act effectively. Policy theories suggest that they can do so by learning the rules of political systems, and by forming relationships and networks with key actors to build up enough knowledge of their environment and trust from their audience. This knowledge allows them to craft effective influencing strategies, such as to tell a persuasive and timely story about an urgent policy problem and its most feasible solution. Empirical case studies help explain when, how, and why such strategies work in context. If analysed carefully , they can provide transferable lessons for researchers and advocates that are seeking to inform or influence policymaking. Oxfam Great Britain has become an experienced and effective advocate of evidence-informed policy change, offering lessons for building effective action. In this article, we combine insights from policy studies with specific case studies of Oxfam campaigns to describe four ways to promote the uptake of research evidence in policy: (1) learn how policymaking works, (2) design evidence to maximise its influence on specific audiences, (3) design and use additional influencing strategies such as insider persuasion or outsider pressure, and adapt the presentation of evidence and influencing strategies to the changing context, and (4) embrace trial and error. The supply of evidence is one important but insufficient part of this story.

This research was funded by, and implemented within, a UK national research organisation, while the author was the KE and Impact Evaluation Manager responsible for assessing impact on a £15m UK government-funded research programme.

This work was also submitted as the authors MBA dissertation which was accepted and awarded in 2009.

ABSTRACT: A methodology and methods ‘toolbox’ is proposed for conducting impact research and assessment from within research programmes. The emphasis is upon how to clarify and assess the wider impacts from the early stages onwards.

The approach explicitly acknowledges, and attempts to address, the known issues and challenges of impact assessment while drawing upon the resources and opportunities available to research managers and researchers within such programmes.

The study has two triangulating foundations. Firstly, it examines the academic literature to help identify and design the pilot methodology and methods. Secondly it trials these in a real programme to both test and improve them.

The study was conducted over one year within one leading UK research organisation, where two research programmes (and around 60 research projects of £15m total value) were being assessed for their impacts. The study draws upon actual impact management experience and reflection, prospective (ex ante) and retrospective (ex post) assessments, participatory contributions from leading researchers undergoing assessment, and consultation with external users. The findings of this study outline the pilot and its first iteration. Recommendations are made for improvement to the methodology and methods.

A subsequent follow-on bid to UK government incorporating the impacts identified from implementing this methodology, successfully led to a further £15m of government funding.

It is expected the pilot methodology and methods will be applicable to other organisations, conducting and funding such research programmes, required to research and assess the wider research impacts.

Although primary focus of implemetation trials was upon research in physical sciences, technology, high-tech engineering, computing/IT, and environment, the wider literature study, the methodology design and justification, the methods proposed and used, and the resulting general recommendations and lessons are expected to apply more broadly to many other research areas, where the impact is to be found more widely in the society, economy, government or public sector or within organizations, policies, professions or the public.

Interest in this work is expected from research programme managers, impact managers and assessors, management consultants advising in this area, and government funding managers, all seeking to embed a developing approach to understand, capture, and enhance wider impact.

Research Councils in the United Kingdom increasingly emphasise the need for funded research to show impact, i.e. ‘the demonstrable contribution that excellent research makes to society and the economy’1. In the literature on endangered languages, a number of authors (e.g., Dobrin & Good 2009) have raised concerns that research by academic linguists generally only benefits academics, but has very little impact in language communities, in contrast with linguists from organisations like SIL who are involved in language development programmes. This paper is a short progress report on some initial language maintenance activities I carried out as part of an ESRC Future Research Leaders project on Eegimaa2. I show that research impact can be an opportunity for academic linguists to contribute to language revitalisation and language development.

Institutional repositories are platforms where a university’s faculty and graduate students can preserve their research outputs. Depositing papers in Open Access repositories will increase the visibility and citation of the article, due to removing barriers to knowledge sharing. It's highly recommended that documents without DOIs to be deposited in the repository that offer DOIs for documents you have deposited. There are several different types of repository that can host your research outputs depending upon your discipline. I will dig into some of them in this workshop.

Research work and knowledge production have a lack of visibility and impact strategies. At the individual level, researchers must share their results and disseminate outputs, such as publications, patents, etc. In addition, research work is a collaborative space based on formal and informal procedures. The literature on the field argues that there is the need to improve the visibility of research in order to enhance its impact, at both the academic and the societal level. This article is based on recent studies about impact-oriented monitoring and assessment. In order to identify researchers' tools and strategies to address this situation, an exploratory study in two university research centers in Portugal was developed. Preliminary results show a need for implementing strategies at both organizational and individual levels that define the relevance of knowledge production for the research center, while simultaneously promoting visibility and impact of this production.

In this study, the structure of co-authorship networks was analyzed using the Macro-level and Micro-level Approach. The study also examined the relationship between centrality measures and citation performance. The research reported here favors a bibliometric approach aiming to visualize the co-authorship networks building on the network analysis method. The population of the research consisted of 24308 authors of the indexed papers in the WOS database. To collect the data pertaining to the citation performance of a given researcher, the articles the given researchers published in a period of three years were taken into account. The citation data (excluding the self-citation) of a given article were gathered considering a three-year lapse after its publication. The results suggested that the mean of co-authorship for each article was 2.8 authors and the ratio of co-authored articles to single-authored was 89.4%. Also, this said co-authorship network was a network of "small world" and lacked "scale". The achieved findings illustrated that any increase in the rate of centrality and betweenness centrality of articles led to an increase in the amount of received citations. That said, no significant relationship was found between closeness centrality and the amount of received citations in this area. In this period, the variable of closeness centrality was able to predict the significance for the citation performance of the researchers

Mainstream knowledge production and communication in the academy generally reflect the tenets of positivist research and predominantly embody hierarchical processes of knowledge transfer. In contrast, a transformative research paradigm is rooted in knowledge mobilization processes involving close collaboration between researchers and community actors as co-enquirers as a part of a broader agenda for progressive social change. They also involve communication strategies that mobilize knowledge beyond those directly involved in the research process. We illustrate the cyclical pattern and transgressive potential of knowledge mobilization processes through a reflective case study of a participatory action research program in the Canadian Prairies. Based on this work, we present three key knowledge mobilization strategies. These include: using transmedia to exchange knowledge across a range of communication media; building bridges to invite communication amongst diverse knowledge communities; and layering to communicate knowledge at varying levels of detail. We critically examine our own practice as a contested and partial process in tension with the institutional and cultural durability of the more linear knowledge transfer paradigm. Knowledge mobilization strategies provide a framework to implement research methods, communication processes and outcomes that are high in impact and relevant in struggles for a more just and resilient society.

This is a draft summary report of a longer thesis on the role of NGOs in research and links between their research, advocacy and service delivery. All comments and feedback very welcome.

There is increasing interest in the role of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in research. NGOs are typically known for their work as service providers or advocates, but some NGOs conduct research alongside these other activities. NGOs’ involvement in service delivery and advocacy may provide opportunities for research. I assess three such opportunities.  First, involvement in service delivery may mean NGOs can identify research questions that respond to frontline  knowledge gaps, so ensuring research is relevant.  Second, service delivery may provide a source of research data, through examining service delivery activities or using  information collected through programme monitoring.  Third, NGOs’ advocacy might support communication of research findings, by bringing a commitment to promoting action and
channels to share results.

These potential advantages of service delivery and advocacy for research are frequently suggested in the literature. However, there is limited evidence on the way these relationships between research, service delivery and advocacy work in practice, or on their variation between different contexts. This leaves little guidance on conditions needed to  maximise the value of input from NGOs’ service delivery and advocacy to research.

In response, this report examines these relationships between research, service delivery and advocacy through the experience of four NGOs in Malawi. I consider whether service delivery provides research questions and data and whether advocacy
supports research communication. Based on the case NGOs’ experiences, I identify conditions within and outside NGOs that affect the value of drawing on service delivery and advocacy in these ways and scope to make these connections. I conclude by
providing guidance on ways to support an effective role for NGOs’ service delivery and advocacy in research, with recommendations for NGOs, academic partners and
donors.

Abstract: “Research Tools” can be defined as vehicles that broadly facilitate research and related activities. Scientific tools enable researchers to collect, organize, analyze, visualize and publicized research outputs. Dr. Nader has collected over 700 tools that enable students to follow the correct path in research and to ultimately produce high-quality research outputs with more accuracy and efficiency. It is assembled as an interactive Web-based mind map, titled “Research Tools”, which is updated periodically. “Research Tools” consists of a hierarchical set of nodes. It has four main nodes: (1) Searching the literature, (2) Writing a paper, (3) Targeting suitable journals, and (4) Enhancing visibility and impact of the research. Several free tools can be found in the child nodes. In this workshop some tools as examples from the part 4 (Enhancing visibility and impact of the research) will be described. The e-skills learned from the workshop are useful across various research di...

Digital technologies have disrupted and transformed the way many media organisations have managed their business over the past two decades. The overarching theme of the body of research presented in this paper is the ‘management of media firms’ in a disruptive digital environment, and as such, three crucial questions have underpinned the research strategy. These questions examined: how media firms had managed the digital transition; how media firms are managed; and how can long-term media strategy be developed in an uncertain business environment. These questions were investigated using a practice-led research approach where the media practice context helps to advance knowledge ‘about’ practice and ‘within’ practice to produce actionable knowledge, implementable validity and instrumental impact with stakeholders.

Publication is the beginning of research impact and visibility, thus dissemination of research publications have to be proactive. Researchers can promote their research work in three stages: (1) manuscript preparation and submission; (2) post-publication promoting; and (3) after receiving mentions/citations (monitoring).

The current study evaluates about three primary fronts of research viz. productivity, impact and funding source of the nine central universities situated in North East India in a period from 2006 to 2015. During this period the total cumulative publications from the nine universities was 4011. During the period the research productivity while counted via publication output have seen a Combined Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 23% while the same for research impact is 52% in the citation time window from 2007 to 2016. Universities received funding from 56 Indian and 48 foreign agencies from 17 different countries. DST is the top funding Indian agency, while Korea is the top funding foreign country. " Chemistry " is found to be the most productive research area with most no of publications (25% of total publications) followed by Physics.

Digital technologies have disrupted and transformed the way many media firms have managed their business over the past two decades. The overarching theme of this discussion is the practice-led study of the management of media firms and how research findings can lead to actionable knowledge, instrumental validity and instrumental impact. Two crucial questions have underpinned the research strategy which will now be presented as cases studies, that is: how have media firms managed the digital transition?; and how can long-term media strategy be developed in an uncertain business environment? These questions were investigated using a practice-led research approach where the media practice context helped to advance knowledge ‘about’ practice and ‘within’ practice to produce actionable knowledge, implementable validity and instrumental impact with stakeholders.

Researchers needs to remove many traditional obstacles to disseminate and outreach their research outputs. Academic social networking allows you to connect with other researchers in your field, share your publications, and get feedback on your non-peer-reviewed work. The academic social networking, making your work more widely discoverable and easily available. The two best known academic social networking are ResearchGate and Academia.edu. These sites offer an instant technique to monitor what other people are looking at in your field of research. Both networks are offer roughly the same features. ResearchGate is more closely focused on collaboration and interaction, while Academia.edu often functions more as an academic version of LinkedIn, with an online CV and as a place to share your publications.

The Digital Object Identifier (DOI) is used for identifying intellectual property in the digital environment. The DOI is like a digital fingerprint: Each article receives a unique one at birth, and it can be used to identify the article throughout its lifespan, no matter where it goes. A DOI should be interpreted as 'digital identifier of an object' rather than 'identifier of a digital object'. A DOI can be assigned to any Object. In this workshop you will learn how to define a DOI, prepare Meta Data, and assign a DOI for a journal paper.

Higher education is increasingly becoming a global business. The main factor to distinguish between different universities is university ranking. There are numerous university ranking systems that include a number of citations as one of the measuring indicators. The citations may come from high quality research and publications. However, publishing a high quality paper in scientific journals is only halfway towards receiving citation in the future. The rest of the journey is dependent on disseminating the publications via proper utilization of the “Research Tools”. Proper tools allow the researchers to increase the research impact and citations for their publications. This workshop series will provide various techniques on how one can increase the visibility and enhance the impact of one’s research work.

In this essay I bracket the formally approved UK definition of impact as “an effect on, change or benefit to the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality of life, beyond academia”. I do this in order to focus on the impact of Artistic Research on the practitioner herself, rather than her stakeholders: I am interested in the effects of research before academia. The discourse in question is Western Classical instrumental pedagogy, and the research in question is that undertaken by instrumental pedagogues in conservatoires. My focus is on the passage from output to impact and the means by which practitioners of Artistic Research incorporate impact into output.

Changes are occurring in scholarly communication as scientific discourse and research activities spread across various social media platforms. In this paper, we study altmetrics on the article and journal levels, investigating whether the online attention received by research articles is related to scholarly impact or may be due to other factors. We define a new metric, Journal Social Impact (JSI), based on eleven data sources: CiteULike, Mendeley, F1000, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, mainstream news outlets, Google Plus, Pinterest, Reddit, and sites running Stack Exchange (Q&A). We compare JSI against diverse citation-based metrics, and find that JSI significantly correlates with a number of them. These findings indicate that online attention of scholarly articles is related to traditional journal rankings and favors journals with a longer history of scholarly impact. We also find that journal-level altmetrics have strong significant correlations among themselves, compared with the weak correlations among article-level altmetrics. Another finding is that Mendeley and Twitter have the highest usage and coverage of scholarly activities. Among individual altmetrics, we find that the readership of academic social networks have the highest correlations with citation-based metrics. Our findings deepen the overall understanding of altmetrics and can assist in validating them.

Abstract: The activity of measuring and describing the impact of academic research is becoming increasingly important around the world. We need tools to measure research impact. Bibliometrics as a tool statistically analysis of publications. Bibliometrics has focused on the quantitative analysis of citations and citation counts which is complex. It is so complex and specialized that personal knowledge and experience are insufficient tools for understanding trends for making decisions. However, the reach of a publication can no longer be judged exclusively by the number of times it is cited. Because, we are now in the digital and sharing information age, academic conversations are as likely to be found on various academic social networks. So, we need new tools to measure the research impact. Altmetrics are new metrics proposed as alternatives to Impact Factor for journals and personal citation indexes like hindex. Altmetrics attempts to use the online activity to measure impact, buzz...

This report evaluates the impact of a project that examined the ‘everyday’ realities and impact of climate change on the lives of low-income people in Dhaka, Bangladesh. For my research looking at urban climate resilience and how land tenure affects adaptation to climate change, I spent months in Duaripara informal settlement talking to over 600 people in their homes, workplaces, local teashops, and on street corners to understand how climate change affects their ‘everyday’ lives and what solutions they employ.

The engagement and impact focus of this research project centred on a strong partnership approach to building awareness and action on the ‘everyday’ realities and impact of climate change on the lives of low-income people in Dhaka, through interactive theatre performances, documentary film, educational programmes, and public events aimed at a wide range of publics with varying levels of knowledge on climate change. Central to this project is the focus on learning from those living on the frontlines of climate change to ensure that people are better informed of the priorities and needs of low-income people.

I teamed up with the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Dhaka to explore my research findings through an accessible and engaging Pot Gan; a traditional folk medium that combines melody, drama, pictures, and dancing. The stories and script were all based on the direct testimonies and experiences of the people gathered though my research. The Pot Gan is not a static piece of theatre; it is an interactive, immersive, and local medium that challenges the audience to actively engage with the personal experiences of low-income people affected by climate change.

The Pot Gan has proven to be an inclusive theatrical medium that can deepen engagement and understanding of the ‘everyday’ realities of climate change with an extremely diverse range of audiences. The three live Pot Gan performances in Dhaka were attended by an audience of 634 people, made-up of informal dwellers (research participants and the wider community), academics, policy makers, practitioners, and other key publics. 100% of respondents that attended the live Pot Gan performances said that it is a useful way to build awareness of climate change issues. 76% of those surveyed were not fluent in Bengali, however, only 5% indicated language as a significant barrier to their understanding of the Pot Gan despite it being performed in Bengali. 92% of those surveyed agreed that focusing on the ‘everyday’ experiences of those impacted by climate change was an effective way of communicating the issue.

The Pot Gan has even influenced audiences with existing climate change expertise. While 89% of respondents reported expertise in climate change and/or development, the survey found that 83% had learned something new or that the Pot Gan changed the way that they think about climate change, particularly in the context of Bangladesh. 89% of respondents stated that the Pot Gan made them think differently about how to communicate their own work.

Central to the project is its focus on building awareness and action on climate change through film, with thirteen videos produced as part of the project. To bring the stories from the Dhaka informal dwellers to an even larger international and national audience, the Pot Gan performances were filmed to produce a documentary exploring my findings on the ‘everyday’ realities of climate change.  At least 126,873 people have viewed the project documentary, trailer and video of the Pot Gan performance, mostly on Facebook. In a survey of the varied audiences who viewed the documentary and/or the video of the Pot Gan performance online, 100% said that it was a useful way to build awareness on climate change. 100% of those surveyed agreed that focusing on the ‘everyday’ experiences of those impacted by climate change was an effective way of communicating the issue. Despite 86% of respondents having expertise in climate change and/or development, the survey found that 82% reported learning something new as a result of watching the video(s) or that it changed the way that they think about climate change, particularly in the context of Bangladesh.

To accompany the documentary, a mini film series was recently launched, where informal dwellers from the project field site directly convey their own stories and experiences in the series ‘Living on the Frontlines of Climate Change’. The film series covers how Rohima Akter, Nasrul Islam, and Sufia Begum have been affected by climate change. We hear about their lives, their struggles, and their hopes for their children’s and grandchildren’s future. The project also engages with leading researchers and practitioners, sharing their insights on climate change via video interviews in ‘Expert Viewpoints’.

The documentary was showcased at two sold out, high-profile events in the UK with an audience of 301 people. It was premiered at the UK's largest university museum as part of Manchester Museum’s award-winning Climate Control exhibition. A separate public event was held at Rich Mix London, in collaboration with a Bangladeshi community group, Brick Lane Circle and the International Institute for Environment and Development. True to the premise of the Pot Gan performances in Dhaka, I worked with Theatre of Debate, Tie-Dye Drama and Regent’s High School to develop an event that engaged the audience in informed debate around scientific research. The event posed a similar challenge to the live Pot Gan performances, audience members were invited to move from being passive viewers to active participants engaging with the personal experiences of low-income people affected by climate change.

79% of respondents that attended the public event at Rich Mix thought it was a useful way to build awareness of climate change issues, compared to 88% of respondents that attended the documentary screening at Manchester Museum. 97% of Rich Mix attendees surveyed agreed that focusing on the 'everyday' experiences of those impacted by climate change is an effective way of communicating the issue, compared to 100% of Manchester Museum attendees surveyed. Despite 66% of respondents at Rich Mix and 20% at Manchester Museum having expertise in climate change and/or development, and 75% of the audience at Rich Mix reporting that they think they have directly experienced climate change, a total of 69% of respondents at Rich Mix and 87.5% at Manchester Museum reported learning something new as a result of the event or that it changed the way that they think about climate change, particularly in the context of Bangladesh. 64% of the audience that attended the Rich Mix London event said that they care more about climate change as a result of attending the event. 69% of respondents at Rich Mix stated that the event made them think differently about how to communicate their own work, compared to 50% of respondents at Manchester Museum.

Via educational programmes, the project engaged with students based in Bangladesh, the UK, and Ireland. The project worked with the University of Dhaka to integrate the performance theatre project into their MA programme and helped Bangladeshi students learn about the impacts of climate change on low-income people in Dhaka. In the longer term, involvement with the project will also enhance the students’ employability in a variety of ways. The students gained valuable experience of working on a real academic research project with involvement in all stages of theatre performance, production, and documentray film. The project has recently developed teaching resources to give secondary school teachers in the UK and Ireland support to teach pupils about climate change, and help young people develop the knowledge and skills to think critically about climate change in an urbanising world. The resources are designed as an intervention to achieve impacts on learning outcomes, attitudinal shifts, and behaviour change. Project materials have been used as teaching resources at the University of Manchester with, almost 250 MSc students engaging with the research material through digital media. This aimed to help students to develop their understanding of the diverse, multi-faceted, and complex ways that low-income people experience climate change.

Social media has been critical to driving the project’s potential research reach and impact, including sharing videos, blog posts, and newspaper and magazine articles to a variety of audiences across Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, with the documentary videos and live Pot Gan performance video having reached 126,873 viewers and the 6 newspaper or magazine articles and 17 blog posts published on the project having a readership of at least 29,226. Facebook has been critical for reaching a Bangladesh audience, with almost 90% of the project Facebook page followers from Bangladesh. The project Facebook page has over 4,600 followers and 4,600 likes, has published 99 posts, with a total reach of 399,432 users, with 62,852 of these being engaged users. There have been at least 366 tweets on the project, by 93 different Twitter users, with a total of 68 comments, 808 retweets, and 794 likes mostly from the UK and from an academic or development expertise background.

A curriculum vitae (CV) allows you to showcase yourself and your academic and professional achievements in a concise and effective way. Creating an online CV is presented who you are to your academic and professional peers. Creating and maintaining your online CV is an essential tool in disseminating your research and publications. A scholarly identifiers like ResearcherID and ORCiD provides a solution to the author ambiguity problem within the scholarly research community.

Abstract: The number of citations a paper receives helps to determine the impact of your research. Even if your research is excellent, if no one finds your paper, it won’t be cited. Similar to a company for marketing a retail product, Academic Search Engine Optimization (ASEO) of your journal papers is important to market your research findings. ASEO is almost obligatory if you would like to increase readership of your papers, increase citations and acknowledgment and to create an overall stronger academic visibility, both offline and online. By optimizing your articles, you guarantee that your articles are indexed and gain a higher ranking in general and academic search engines, such as Google Scholar. In order to increase the article visibility and citations, this presentation provides guidelines on how to optimize scholarly literature for academic search engines like Google Scholar. The number of citations a paper receives helps to determine the impact of your research. Even if y...

Abstract: Academic social networking allows you to connect with other researchers in your field, share your publications and datasets, get feedback on your non-peer-reviewed work, and to stay current with news and events in your field of interest. It gives you another place to establish your name and research and perhaps even collaborate with others. The academic social networking, making your work more widely discoverable and easily available. The two best known academic social networking are ResearchGate and Academia.edu. These two networks are offer roughly the same features. ResearchGate is more closely focused on collaboration and interaction, while Academia.edu often functions more as an academic version of LinkedIn, with an online CV and as a place to share your publications. Academic social networking allows you to connect with other researchers in your field, share your publications and datasets, get feedback on your non-peer-reviewed work, and to stay current with news and...

Abstract: The number of citations contributes to over 30% in the university rankings. Therefore, most of the scientists are looking for an effective method to increase their citation record. On the other hand, increase research visibility in the academic world in order to receive comments and citations from fellow researchers across the globe, is essential. Publishing a high quality paper in scientific journals is only halfway towards receiving citation in the future. The rest of the journey is dependent on disseminating the publications via proper utilization of the “Research Tools”. Proper tools allow the researchers to increase the research impact and citations for their publications. These workshop series will provide various techniques on how one can increase the visibility and enhance the impact of one’s research work. The number of citations contributes to over 30% in the university rankings. Therefore, most of the scientists are looking for an effective method to increase th...

Reference Management tools offer an easy way of finding relevant literature, collecting references, organizing them in a database, and insert citations works in a manuscript with proper citation style. Most of the new Reference Management tools provide facility to connect with other researchers that you can’t find on other platforms. An online reference management tools provide easier collaboration and use across multiple devices and assist you to improve publication visibility and impact.