Cancer research impact
The impact of would like your feedback, please fill in our ting the broader societal impact of research is increasingly important for research funders. And how should we work with the research community to ensure we know our research is bringing the greatest possible impact to cancer patients? We are plugging into this evolving area to link the activity we fund to eventual patient impact, explains rachel stirzaker, our director of is really important to us to fund exceptional cancer research and to support the community that delivers it. Brief history of research impact assessment involves plotting a path from input right through to patient impact (see diagram). The concept is not new, but is increasingly important for is a need for society to hold research funders and organisations undertaking research to account. We have a duty to make research effective if we are using taxpayers’ and donors’ money.
Professor jonathan grant, assistant principal for strategic initiatives and public policy, king’s college ch impact and its assessment has moved up the science policy agenda, jonathan says, and now plays a strong role in the uk’s research excellence framework (ref), which determines university funding. Changes introduced in 2014 mean the impact of research beyond academia now accounts for 20% of the overall assessment, which has changed the conversation around research funding and impact, making it more mainstream and visible. The ref pushed people to really consider the impact of their research,” says andrew knowles, senior research evaluation manager at r, ref’s impact assessment hasn’t been without its critics, with claims including extra admin time for reporting. These included retaining peer review as a key assessment tool, supported by appropriate metrics and data, and the introduction of institutional level impact case studies to better showcase interdisciplinary dr george santangelo, director of the office of portfolio analysis at the us national institutes of health (nih), points out, impact assessment is an evolving process, involving learning from past experiences and collaborating with the research assessment pathway from input to patient d from csiro (commonwealth scientific and industrial research organisation). The 2014, we joined researchfish, an online platform that enables us to capture research outputs and outcomes directly from researchers and link them with inputs. Andrew describes researchfish as a tool that helps collect a “wealth of information” on the research we fund.
Aware of the risk of creating more admin for researchers, we worked closely with many funders, including research councils uk, to agree a shared set of questions for the platform. In just three years, researchfish® is providing us with a great deal of new insight that we wouldn’t have previously collected or researchfish provides a granular view and is generating a better knowledge of outputs, we know there is more to be done to monitor and measure impact. As andrew explains, “we are currently at stage one: considering impact assessment, clarifying our objectives and starting a conversation with our research community so we can work together on stage two – developing the tools and measures to gauge impact and the charity’s progress. For starters, there are 16 different frameworks and models that already exist for assessing impact, according to a review published in 2015 in health research policy and systems, and each has its own benefits and downsides. He is of the mind that traditional impact gauges – used mainly because they are easy to measure, such as publications, citations and journal impact factors – are flawed metrics, and he believes a more effective metric is needed. George and his team has developed the relative citation ratio, which looks at the citations of individual papers and the rate these are accrued, adjusted for different research disciplines, as a proxy of ‘influence’ rather than impact.
He is pleased with the buy-in from the community, but “no one metric will capture impact”, he notes. Instead, there needs to be a diversity of metrics – which could include measuring translation into treatments, media mentions, patents, data sharing, reproducibility and quality based on human judgement – and these need to be developed collaboratively with the research ds of scientists and research organisations also hold this view, criticising the reliance on the journal impact factor and signing the declaration on research assessment (dora). As a signatory of this declaration, we are committed to accurately measuring output and improving the ways research is evaluated. We want to take a wide-ranging approach, incorporating lots of data sources and a whole host of existing information, to develop a broad suite of metrics that work for cruk at each stage of the impact pathway” andrew says. Researchfish is aiming to improve interoperability between systems, with work so far focusing on publication records between institutions and funders – a recent pilot study showed significantly reduced reporting times for researchers with this increased sharing of data. Researchers can also share information between their researchfish account and their orcid ing impact – and doing it well – is a necessity for cruk.
To be able to understand where we’ve had impact, and where we could help to drive impact if we applied funding, has become central to our decision making,” says andrew. We will continue to fund high quality research, and building on learnings and collaborations to date, we will establish an appropriate suite of metrics for cruk. Our supporters increasingly expect to understand how their money is helping to solve the cancer problem as part of their reason to donate; ultimately, our aim is to use our supporters’ money in the most effective and efficient way, helping the researchers we fund generate the greatest impact for cancer ant principal, strategic initiatives and public policy, king’s college research evaluation manager, or of office of portfolio analysis, us national institutes of health (nih). Of strategy, story is part of pioneering research 2016/17, our annual research ring research is packed with features celebrating the many achievements for cruk and for researchers in our community over the last year, and the work we are doing right now as we implement our research more stories and explore our funding stories like and figures about our research 2016/17 we supported research worth £386 million. From our core research institutes to investigator-led programmes and training fellowships, explore in more detail how and where we fund research, and how your own work fits e our funding ng hard-to-treat ing the quality and quantity of research into cancers with the poorest survival rates, including brain and pancreatic cancers, remains a key priority across all aspects of our research sing the power of diverse 're driving collaboration and strengthening networking as multidisciplinary team science becomes ever more essential to beating out how we're innovating to drive team text in this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution 2. Uk: england & wales ing the impact of would like your feedback, please fill in our ting the broader societal impact of research is increasingly important for research funders.
