increasing body of research analytically exploresthe consequences of the research impact agenda on academic work,including the risks posed to research quality (Chubb and Reed2018), prioritising of short-term impacts rather than more concep-tual impacts (Greenhalgh and Fahy 2015; Meagher and Martin2017), ethical risks (Smith and Stewart 2017), and a focus on indi-vidual academics rather than on the broader context of research-based policy change (Dunlop 2018)

Unsur-prisingly, therefore, existing research documents various ways in which REF impact has becomeembedded within university governance, including via the broadening of career progression criteria(Bandola-Gill 2019)

RANDreport that had been commissioned by HEFCE (Grant et al. 2010)

while there aregroups potentially benefiting from the case studies relating to their field of research (egwriters benefiting from studies in Panel D, engineers benefiting from studies in PanelB), there are mentions of these potential beneficiaries across all the panels

With the benefit of hindsight, our analysis would have been much easierif the case studies had greater structure and used standardized definitions. Giventhat the case studies spanned a 20-year period, organization names have changed inthat time and keyword searches were not sophisticated enough to capture some keyinformation.

Topic modelling was used to determine common topics across the wholecorpus. Sixty-five topics were found (of which 60 were used) using theApache Mallet Toolkit Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) algorithm.

any effect on, change or benefit to the economy, society,culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality of life, beyondacademia’ (REF, 2011).

Research funders and providers are having to compete with other public services, and,as such, must be able to advocate the need for funding of research. Leaders within thesector must have compelling arguments to ‘make the case’ for research. For example,the Research Councils each publish an annual impact report which describe the waysin which they are maximising the impacts of their investments. These reports includeillustrations of how their research and training has made a contribution to the economyand society.10 The analysis of Researchfish and other similar data can support thedevelopment of these cases

Research outputs (and outcomes and impact) are gathered through a ‘questionset’ developed by funding institutions through a consultative process. This set of16 questions contains 175 sub-questions as illustrated in Figure 3 (the full set ofquestions are available in Annex A). A researcher, or one of their delegates, can add,edit and delete entries, and crucially, attribute entries to research grants and awards

The term ‘impact’ is currently used widely in research, especially with the inclusion ofnon-academic impact as part of the latest Research Excellence Framework (REF)

look at the economicimpact of research – taking an area of research(often cardiovascular disease), calculating thetotal investment in research and comparing it tothe total payback in terms of monetarised healthbenefit and other economic effects.