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Planning for publication and impact
I had the privilege of speaking at the Law and Society Association of Australia and New Zealand Postgraduate and Early Career Researcher Workshop 2024 on understanding impact and disseminating law and society research. The workshop offered a wide-ranging discussion of publishing, impact and navigating an academic career as an ECR. If you aren’t yet a member of the LSAANZ, do consider it. As part of that workshop, with A/Prof Bridgette Toy-Cronin of the University of Otago, I put together some handouts and activities to help ECR attendees think about their publication choices and how to embed and plan for research impact. I thought those questions and prompts were worth sharing…
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Tracking impact
Universities are increasingly attuned to the ‘impact’ agenda – seeking to measure and quantify the impact of our work on society. The Australian Research Council defines ‘research impact’ as ‘the contribution that research makes to the economy, society, environment or culture, beyond the contribution to academic research.’ In many fields, ‘impact’ is measured through citation counts. This is problematic for multiple reasons: self-citations can ‘game’ citation counts (and are included in most citation measures); and a highly cited article could be cited a lot because it is so bad! So use citation data with caution. Also, we need to contextualise any impact data in the context of our field; so…
