How do you actually ‘make an impact’?

Guidance from the field

The many different channels and quality standards may sometimes make it difficult to see the wood for the trees when it comes to making an impact, particularly if you are a relatively young researcher. But it can also be difficult if you have spent decades working in an environment where the focus was on the intrinsic quality of your work, rather than on how well you communicate your message. You will be facing many new and complex questions. How can you increase the likelihood of your research having an impact on society in the way you design your study, enter into partnerships and communicate? What can you reasonably expect to accomplish? What does ‘meaningful science’ look and feel like? How should you handle the media and social ‘heat’ that you might generate by engaging in public science? How do you actually go about influencing professionals, executives or public administrators? And what do you do if policymakers or companies make selective or improper use of your work? We will briefly address all these questions. One question that we will not go into here, but which merits more thought, is how best to organise the field itself. The social sciences and humanities cover a wide range of disciplines and paradigms and address a multitude of issues and subjects. Our diversity is a great asset, but it comes at a price: a weaker culture of cooperation, knowledge-sharing and knowledge accumulation than that among medical practitioners, for example. The SSH field could likely generate more impact by better organising itself.