Disseminate Research Findings

In this blog, Mark Reed draws on his own research to distill five principles for achieving societal impact.

The Societal Impact toolkit includes advice and insights from researcher interviews, as well as further reading resources, methods and evaluation tools to help you find out more about societal impact and how to create it for your own research.

One of the key aims of the ACCOMPLISSH project is to foster dialogue between researchers and relevant stakeholders in order to increase the impact of Social Science and Humanities research. This report summarises practical principles and steps that universities can adopt in order to enable and encourage co-creation for impact.

The Arts + Social Impact Explorer is another interactive, visual tool intended to promote deeper understanding of the arts’ long-term social impact by drawing together research in an effort to make more visible the wide-reaching impact of the arts.

The Trinity Long Room Hub’s Interdisciplinarity for Impact Workshop Report summarises a set of recommendations for a number of different stakeholders to help better foster and support IDR at a national level.

In this discussion paper, the HIBAR Research Alliance (HRA) brings together contributors from research universities and related organizations, with a goal of catalysing societally relevant research which they describe as “Highly Integrative Basic and Responsive (HIBAR)”.

One of the core tenets of transdisciplinary research is its relevance to society. In this open access article, Christian Pohl and colleagues offer a 10-step step guide to stimulating explicit reflections around ways to render research more societally relevant.

In this blog, policy scholars, Kat Smith and Paul Cairney, reflect on what they feel are some of the key insights about the interplay between evidence and policy.

This guide for facilitators and funders of research policy exchange programmes translates lessons learned from the 2020 Energy-SHIFTS Policy Fellowships into five principal questions.

As part of its training programme, the Zurich-Basel Plant Science Center has produced a series of workbooks targeted to researchers wishing to communicate research findings to policymakers. Although written for PhD students in the life sciences, there are valuable general lessons for others working at the research-policy interface.

This Nature article discusses the EC Joint Research Centre’s work on knowledge management. The authors outline eight key practices to improve the use of research in policy.

‘Evidence synthesis’ refers to the process of bringing together information from a range of sources and disciplines to inform debates and decisions on specific issues. The UK’s Academy of Medical Sciences and Royal Society have produced a report on the topic and a set of set of principles for best practice in evidence synthesis.

This guide to getting evidence into parliament – co-authored by the UK’s Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST) – includes a useful infographic.

The EC has produced an open access book  Communicating Research for Evidence-Based Policymaking, a practical guide to supporting cooperation between researchers and policymakers that is aimed at social scientists and humanities researchers.

This open access article analyses how knowledge transfer between academy, public administration and society can be used to improve public policy.

SHAPE-ID partner Catherine Lyall provides her Top Ten Tips for working with policymakers.

Here we include two guides, one from a government policy perspective.

And the other from a civil society organisation.

The UK Parliamentary Office for Science and Technology (POST) has also collaborated on the production on this how-to guide to getting your research into Parliament.

The European Commission has produced a practical guide for researchers in socio-economic sciences and humanities on communicating research for evidence-based policymaking.

In this article, linked to an online course, Tobias Buser explains why project partners are important when it comes to widening the scope of communication and impact.

The AAAS Communication Toolkit provides guidance for “scientists” to build skills to more effectively communicate and engage with public audiences – don’t be put off by the term “scientists”, there are some good communication fundamentals here.

The EU Guide to Science Communication covers similar communication basics in video form.

As part of the Guide to Science Communication, the EU also produced these 9 short videos on  topics such as Engage your audience  or Working with museums.

This website from a UK research funder provides many resources designed to support knowledge exchange including a guide on how to write a press release.

The Wellcome Trust offers a short step by step guide to planning public engagement activities.

Mark Reed’s Fast Track Impact website provides a range of resources and training including a series of audio clips on techniques for influencing policy.

And a Media Impact Guide and Toolkit.

Another form of communication takes place between those who speak and work in different languages. This blog post discusses the importance of multilingualism for transdisciplinary research.

Useful guidance on author contributions to academic papers are offered by the CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) author statement following a collaborative workshop led by Harvard University and the Wellcome Trust, with input from researchers, the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) and publishers.

The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors offers further guidance on defining the role of authors and contributors.

This good practice charter from the Artists’ Union includes some tips on paying artists for networking and skills sharing.

A range of views are presented on this topic on the London School of Economics blog including this summary of key themes.

The British Academy has provided comments on the Plan S proposal from the perspective of the arts and humanities.

A key element of getting academic work published is identifying the right journal to submit it to. The ITD Alliance’s website provides a comprehensive list of ID and TD friendly journals.

SHAPE-ID have produced a guide to OPERAS, a European Research Infrastructure for the development of open scholarly communication in the Social Sciences and Humanities.

And a guide to Open Science and the Arts Humanities and Social Sciences.