Rethinking the language of research impact

Around the world, researchers are increasingly asked, incentivized, or required to demonstrate how their scholarship can have, or has had, a positive impact on society. This reflects the assumption that research should generate value beyond academia, and the growing pressure on academic and research institutions, under political scrutiny, to show their worth. Encouraged to plan and assess the impact of their work, researchers are often guided towards logic models and language borrowed from intervention-focused evaluation and planning programmes. But there is one central, even existential, problem with this approach: research is not a programme or an intervention, and tensions emerge from efforts to plan or evaluate its potential or real impact as though it is one. Here, we focus on a practical aspect of this issue: the language that many governments, funders and institutions use to frame, understand, and train researchers to plan, achieve and assess research impact. We argue that impact planning, ‘evidencing’, and theories of change can oversimply the relationship between research and society, and do not adequately guide researchers towards meaningful impact. We propose alternative language and frameworks that align with recent developments in the social science literature on the research-practice-policy interface and identify the skills and resources needed to support a wider range of researchers. This shift in language will help clarify to researchers, higher education administrators, and research funders that impact is not a product to be delivered, but a possibility to be cultivated.