Abstract
Recently, the need to contribute to the evaluation of the scientific, social, and political impact of Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) research has become a demand of policy makers and society. The international scientific community has made significant advances that have transformed the impact of evaluation landscape. This article reviews the existing scientific knowledge on evaluation tools and techniques that are applied to assess the scientific impact of SSH research; the changing structure of social and political impacts of SSH research is investigated based on an overarching research question: to what extent do scholars attempt to apply methods, instruments, and approaches that take into ac-count the distinctive features of SSH? The review also includes examples of European Union (EU) pro-jects that demonstrate these impacts. This article culminates in a discussion of the development of the assessment of different impacts and identifies limitations, and areas and topics to explore in the future.
Highlights
A key concern of contemporary research policies is to demonstrate the ‘impact’ of research, or the value that public investment in research generates for increasing scientific competitiveness and excellence of the country, wealth creation, productivity, and social well-being
This article reviews the existing scientific knowledge on evaluation tools and techniques that are applied to assess the scientific impact of Sciences and Humanities (SSH) research; the changing structure of social and political impacts of SSH research is investigated based on an overarching research question: to what extent do scholars attempt to apply methods, instruments, and approaches that take into account the distinctive features of SSH? The review includes examples of European Union (EU) projects that demonstrate these impacts
The research questions the article addresses are: How far does impact assessment in SSH attempt to apply methods, instruments and approaches that take into account the distinctive features of SSH? and: Are the dominant (STEM) perspectives of impact evaluation applicable to SSH research? We investigate these questions through the review of the literature, which sheds light on the state of the art of knowledge production in the field, and allows us to understand what is still missing in the analysis and the relevant gaps that need to be addressed
Summary
A key concern of contemporary research policies is to demonstrate the ‘impact’ of research, or the value that public investment in research generates for increasing scientific competitiveness and excellence of the country, wealth creation, productivity, and social well-being. Impact is often understood as a change that research outcomes produce upon academic activities, the economy, and society at large. Speaking of ‘attributable change’ poses some problems, such as finding adequate tools and methods to measure impact, the time lag between the effect produced and the research activities that are supposed to have generated it, as well as the problem of disentangling the extent to which the research results were the sole or most significant causes of the effect produced.
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