Research & The Real World

For researchers, knowing where and how their work matters can determine the direction of future investigations and the trajectory of careers.

In laboratories and libraries, ivory towers and coffee shops, scholars of all fields work out innovative answers to pressing problems.  The setting for such research, on subjects from economics to the environment, may seem remote or even removed from our lives, yet the impact will eventually reach us directly.

Sage Policy Profiles, a new web-based tool from Sage and Overton, lets researchers uncover and understand the influence their evidence-based research may have on public policy by identifying citations of the work in policy documents, think tank publications, and working papers.

Researchers and academics have for decades monitored the impact of their work by following citations of published articles in the scholarly world.  Sage Policy Profiles now lets them calculate a real-world impact, according to Camille Gamboa, associate vice president of corporate communications, Sage.

“Sage Policy Profiles was intended to allow researchers to easily see where their work is being used in the real world and specifically in global policy, and to illustrate and share that work’s impact graphically,” Gamboa explains.

“Since we’re simply reporting on the trail of citations, there are no calculations involved.  That said, the data the tool presents provide a rich narrative and a more complete picture of research impact than citation-based metrics alone,” she tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally.

“You may have heard of Goodhart’s Law – the principle that once you create a measurement, it ceases to become useful, because it distorts behavior in undesirable ways.  We aren’t trying to create a new metric to fetishize with the Policy Profiles, but we are absolutely trying to make it easy for researchers, their communities, institutions, and funders to understand more thoroughly the value of their work.”