4.6.1. Research Achievements

In 2020, Wits academics continued their high quality research, enabling us to record about 19 significant discoveries while continuing publishing high quality work. The detail in the research report below will further attest to their productivity and excellence. 4.6.1. Research Achievements

In 2020, Wits announced 19 major discoveries (12 in 2019) with an accumulated advertising equivalent of R20.6 million (R15.6 million in 2019 and R9.5 million in 2018). These announcements are important as they fit in with our notionofproducingresearchwithimpact,wheretakeupisimportant.Theadvertisingequivalentvaluegivessome sense of the interest that the news media had in distributing this information. Other measures of the spread of this knowledge are the Twitter and Facebook impressions (54 758 and 240 821) respectively. However, nothing replaces the value of peer-reviewed publications. Wits’ affiliated authors once again made 2020 asuccessfulyearforresearchpublications.Twoimportantbibliometricdatabasesthatareusedtotrackproductivity throughout the year are the Web of Science (also called by its historic name, the ISI database) and Scopus. The following figures show the growth of published items by Wits affiliated researchers, with 2020 outputs exceeding 2019 outputs.