EUDAPA: academic, social and employment impact of an international program

Introduction: Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a highly infectious disease declared a pandemic on March 11, 2020, by WHO. As a preventive measure, Nepal was put into lockdown from 24 March to 21 July, 2020 for the first wave of COVID-19 infection. Sudden lockdown prompted the widespread closure of educational institutions. This study aimed to assess the academic and social impact due to COVID-19 lockdown on undergraduate students. Method: A web based cross sectional study was conducted among 403 undergraduate students of Manipal College of Medical Sciences (MCOMS), Pokhara Nepal using the total enumeration method after the ethical approval from Institutional Review Committee (IRC), Manipal Teaching Hospital. Data was collected through online self-administered questionnaires by using Microsoft Form. Analysis of the results was done by using descriptive and inferential statistics. Result: High academic (55.6%) and social (53.8%) impact was seen in the students. Female (OR: 1.76; CI 1.1-2.82), Nepalese students (OR: 2.05; CI 1.19-3.51), data pack users (OR: 2.09; CI 1.16-3.78) were more likely to have a high academic impact. Foreign students (OR: 1.88; CI 1.11-3.11) and students having a daily update of COVID-19 (OR: 2.2; CI 1.03-4.66) were more likely to have a high social impact. Conclusion: Academic impact was seen more in female and Nepalese students while the social impact was high among foreign students. Educational activities need to continue in this critical situation. Concerned authorities need to focus on the improvement of digital infrastructure and technology along with the continuation of clinical learning with safety precautions during this pandemic time for better learning among students.

Open access academic achievements include not only papers and journals, but also books, which have become an important achievement for scholars and can be regarded as scholarly critical products. Until recently, books have had a key role in the distribution of knowledge and the main issue is which category of open or non-open access books is more effective in academic society. Thus, this study compares the difference between open access and non-open access books in terms of knowledge distribution. We collected and analyzed data from Twitter, Mendeley, and Dimensions platform, as well as the dataset of all Springer books. Twitter and Mendeley are considered alternative metric indicators, which reflect impacts with citation indicators. Data were analyzed from static and comparative perspectives. Results showed a relationship between academic impact and social impact based on citation and social media attention for OA books, and indicated that open access books boost knowledge distribution in Twitter and Mendeley for the sample of books drawn from Springer under study. Moreover, the open access books have the added advantage of keeping sustained impact for a long time. It is sensible to assess the impact of OA books through knowledge distribution. However, there is no significant correlation between citation and social media attention regarding OA books and also the social and academic impact of books in some disciplines such as Geography, Medicine, and Public Health, Culture, and Media Studies attract more social media attention. According to the analysis, the correlation with citations for the number of mentions on social media is negligible, which indicates that social media measures bear different impacts from citations. However, social impact is similar to the complementary measures which should be considered within the impact evaluation of OA books. Therefore, only when OA books are accessed through the channels of communication can the knowledge contained in books be absorbed to generate impact, and lowering the access barrier does lead to more attention found for OA research papers. The findings demonstrated that the OA books and OA papers do not have similar impacts on the citation. Also, OA books could not attract more citations than non-OA books in some disciplines, which is why open access books have a significant impact on social media attention.

Engaged scholarship begins with the premise that academic research cannot only be rigorous, but also have social impact by addressing important organizational and community issues. A tacit assumption in much of the literature on engaged organizational communication scholarship is that we have a clear understanding of what we mean by social impact. This chapter explores how various indicators and metrics constitute the meaning of academic and social impact. I argue that there is relatively little overlap in the indicators that are currently used to assess academic and social impact and that this poses important challenges for organizational communication scholars who wish to do engaged scholarship. Five practices are offered to facilitate organizational communication scholars determine the kind of impact they wish to make and manage the challenges posed by the competing demands of demonstrating academic and social impact: (1) connect with your scholarly passion, (2) practice triple translation, (3) develop emergent design skills, (4) go big, and (5) research on the go.

This study attempts to investigate the relationship between scientific collaboration variety and scientific output in a specific field. The indicators were set from co-author variety (co-author’s academic background variety and co-author’s network structure variety as independent variables) and article impact (academic impact and social impact as dependent variables). Considering other factors affecting the research results, we also set up control variables (the number of co-authors, proportion of high-level authors and ratio of highly productive authors). We used the Scopus database as the data source and collected all articles published in the dental field in 2018 as data. We used multiple linear regression analyses to examine the impact of co-authors’ variety on the article impact. The results demonstrate that the relationship between scientific collaboration variety and article impact is complicated, which depends on the type of variety of the cooperative scientist. Conversely, the same variety indicator presents the same results as the correlation analysis of academic and social impact articles. The findings indicate that authors can improve their scientific output by collaborating with similar authors of academic backgrounds or stable groups of authors, which provides guidance for scientific cooperation.

Social media platforms are increasingly used in recent years to support learning activities, especially for the construction of activity- and learner-centric personal learning environments (PLEs). This thesis investigates the solutions to four essential design requirements for social media based PLEs: support for help seeking, privacy protection, identity management and activity monitoring, as well as context awareness. Three main components of the thesis, reputation, privacy, and identity, are built upon these four design requirements. We investigate the three components through the following research questions. How do we help learners to find suitable experts or peers who they can learn from or collaborate with in a particular learning context? How can we design a proper privacy mechanism to make sure the information shared by learners is only disclosed to the intended audience in a given context? What identity scheme should be used to preserve the privacy of learners while also providing personalized learning experience, especially for teenage learners? To tackle the design requirement of support for help seeking, we address the reputation dimension in the context of personal learning for doctoral studies, where doctoral students need to find influential experts or peers in a particular domain. We propose an approach to detect a domain-specific community in academic social media platforms. Based on that, we investigate the influence of scholars taking both their academic and social impact into account. We propose a measure called R-Index that aggregates the readership of a scholar's publications to assess her academic impact. Furthermore, we add the social dimension into the influence measure by adopting network centrality metrics in a domain-specific community. Our results show that academic influence and social influence measures do not strongly correlate with each other, which implies that, adding the social dimension could enhance the traditional impact metrics that only take academic influence into account. Moreover, we tackle the privacy dimension of designing a PLE in the context of higher education. To protect against unauthorized access to learners' data, we propose a privacy control approach that allows learners to specify the audience, action, and artifact for their sharing behavior. Then we introduce the notion of privacy protocol with which learners can define fine-grained sharing rules. To provide a usable application of the privacy protocol in social media based PLEs, we exploit the space concept that provides an easy way for users to define the privacy protocols within a particular context. The proposed approach is evaluated through two user studies. The results reveal that learners confirm the usefulness and usability of the privacy enhanced sharing scheme based on spaces. In the last part of the thesis, we study the identity dimension in the context of STEM education at secondary and high schools. To support personalization while also preserving learners' privacy, we propose a classroom-like pseudonymity scheme that allows tracking of learners' activities while keeping their real identities undisclosed. In addition, we present a data storage mechanism called Vault that allows apps to store and exchange data within the scope of a Web-based inquiry learning space.

Re: Nicholas Corsi, David-Dan Nguyen, Mohit Butaney, et al. Top 100 Urology Influencers on Twitter: Is Social Media Influence Associated with Academic Impact? Eur Urol Focus. In press. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.euf.2022.09.009: Hirsch versus Kardashian: Assessing Discrepancies in Social Media Influence Versus Productivity and Citation Impact of Urological Influencers

Measuring program impact is continually placed in the forefront of discussions, efforts, and reporting when it comes to outreach and engagement efforts related to Cooperative Extension. However, the diversity of programs represented through program areas, as well as the complexities of local infrastructures present ongoing challenges to effectively addressing needs in community development and vitality. One of the greater hurdles in these efforts is addressing areas of social impact. This article argues for a deliberate attempt to parse out efforts that address social impact, while looking for ways to bring such impact full circle with existing efforts in economic impact. This article answers the following questions: (1) How is program impact defined as it relates to the land-grant university? and (2) How is social impact defined, and what are the common approaches to examining/measuring social impact? Based on this review of the literature, we describe and justify a proposed model approach for overall community diagnostics, directly supporting social impact assessment efforts. Such a proposed model would then have the capacity to lead to two very distinct and applicable outcomes that ultimately lead to measuring and examining program impact. The first is an immediate snapshot of a given community for diagnostic purposes; and the second would create a framework by which longitudinal data could be collected, which can then demonstrate changes and shifts over time. Such data can then provide a more holistic approach to program planning, development, and overall evaluation. Keywords: community development; Extension; needs assessment; program evaluation; social impact

El valor de la ciencia para la sociedad es indiscutible, pero para generar un impacto social y educativo, es indispensable saber transferir el conocimiento científico. El objetivo de este artículo es analizar la relevancia y el impacto de la difusión de un artículo científico en el proceso de construcción de la ciencia y su transferencia a la sociedad. También pretende valorar la irrupción de nuevos canales de difusión para el aumento de la visibilidad y la transferencia de los avances científicos, y explorar las analíticas del blog académico colaborativo propio del consorcio Aula Magna 2.0 como recurso de difusión de la ciencia para generar impacto.
 El artículo analiza, mediante metodología cuantitativa descriptiva, a partir del análisis empírico de los datos extraídos del blog utilizado por dicho consorcio, su capacidad para propiciar visibilidad, impacto y transferencia del conocimiento en el contexto de las revistas científicas de educación.
 Los principales resultados destacan el valor de los nuevos canales de comunicación de la ciencia, así como la necesidad de nuevos indicadores y criterios para evaluar su impacto. Estos nuevos canales aportan visibilidad a la investigación y capacidad de transferir ese conocimiento, adecuando lenguaje, formato y estilo a los diferentes colectivos receptores del mismo. En el caso del blog Aula Magna 2.0, los datos presentados permiten concluir que es un medio valioso de difusión del conocimiento a través de un espacio de colaboración, a la vez que permite generar impacto social y educativo.

This commentary responds to an article by Melissa Grant, Lucy Vernall and Kirsty Hill in Research for All (Grant et al., 2018) that assessed the impact of broadcast programming through quantitative and qualitative evidence. In that piece, the authors attended exclusively to the uptake by, and attitudes of, end users. But viewer or social media statistics can paint a patchy picture, and feedback groups recreate an unusually attentive mode of reception. This commentary argues for an alternative or complementary emphasis on the participation of academics in producing broadcast programming for the purposes of writing REF impact templates. In highlighting the process of programme-making rather than the reception of a completed output, the commentary seeks to 'read' academic impact on the media in a more dynamic way, and speaks to the sometimes substantial and substantive involvement of academics prior to a programme's broadcast and its ultimate effects in the public sphere. Indeed, a focus on the 'front-loaded' impact by academics in the media, and on their longer-term institutional ripple effects, offers evidence that is more easily captured than establishing the attitudes of audiences. The latter are notoriously difficult to determine and, as Grant et al.'s (2018) data show, do not always do justice to the importance of media work as part of impactful academic activity.

This paper aims to assess the social impact of the Hafidzpreneur scholarship program organized by the Riau Provincial government using Social Return on Investment (SROI) analysis as its main approach. A qualitative approach has been applied to better understand the impacts associated with these projects, while in-depth interviews have been the main tool in data collection. The results of the SROI analysis yielded a ratio of 1:4.2, reflecting that each unit investment of Rp 1 generates a social impact and value of Rp 4.2. This finding reflects the significant positive impact of the program in creating social value that covers multiple dimensions, including financial, social, and spiritual aspects. The findings also suggest that the use of the SROI approach and qualitative methods has provided an in-depth understanding of the impact of the holistic development projects of the Hafidzpreneur scholarship program provided by the Riau Provincial government. The results of this study have strong implications in designing, managing, and measuring the impact of similar programs in the future, as well as in enhancing a broader understanding of the social value generated by organizations for sustainable development.

Background#OrthoTwitter has evolved to disseminate findings and engage the public. However, the academic impact of Twitter utilization in orthopaedic surgery is unknown.Questions/purposesThe purpose of the study was to evaluate relationships between the author and manuscript Twitter activity and citations.MethodsManuscripts in 17 orthopaedic journals from 2018 were identified. Citations, online mentions, impact factors, and subspecialties were obtained. H-index and Twitter account details for authors were obtained for a subset of manuscripts. Relationships between Twitter activity and citations were evaluated.Results2,473/4,224 (58.5%) manuscripts were mentioned on Twitter (n=29,958 mentions), with Twitter manuscripts cited more frequently (median 10 vs. 7, p<0.0001). Twitter mentions, impact factors, non-open-access status, and subspecialties were associated with citation counts. Articles mentioned in 10, 100, and 1,000 Tweets were observed to have a 1.1-fold, 1.7-fold, and 245-fold increase in citations. In author-level analyses, 156 (20.0%) first and 216 (27.7%) senior authors had Twitter accounts. Citation count was associated with increasing senior author H-index (βest=0.13, p<0.05), Twitter mentions (βest=0.0043, p<0.0001), impact factors (βest=0.13, p<0.0001), and having a first (βest=0.20, p<0.05) or senior author (βest=0.17, p<0.05) on Twitter. Articles published in arthroplasty (βest=0.49, p<0.05), general interest (βest=0.55, p<0.01), sports (βest=0.63, p<0.01), and non-open access journals (βest=0.41, p<0.001) were cited more. H-index correlated with followers for first (rho=0.31, p<0.0001) and senior authors (rho=0.44, p<0.0001).ConclusionAuthor Twitter utilization is independently associated with manuscript citations. Authors should be aware of the potential association between social media utilization and traditional academic impact. Understanding the relationship between social media utilization and academic impact is necessary to effectively disseminate research.

Climate change is currently a main focus of many research related projects. It is important to monitor and evaluate the impact of this research to understand its dissemination and contribution. This study made use of two online platforms, Altmetric and Overton, to determine the academic, social and policy impact of climate change research associated with a South African tertiary institution. Comparisons between the two platforms and types of impact were made using correlations and paired t-tests. Results showed a high academic and policy impact, with lower online social attention. Online social impact did not predict academic impact however, a three-year delay was identified between online attention and policy inclusion. Findings suggested that research was disseminated and engaged with among many sectors and subject areas, highlighting an interdisciplinary impact resulting in real-world solutions.

There is the general expectation that universities (higher education institutions), especially public universities, should deliver high-level education, should play a significant role in the development of society (social impact), and that academicians are expected to deliver basic research and publish its results (academic impact). This essay discusses whether these three core dimensions are well-balanced in the current university system. The answer is very close to ‘no’, as in most countries, and especially in countries using performance financing allocation of public grants to universities, the academic impact receives too much attention. Unfortunately, too heavy of a focus on academic impact delivers critical moral dilemmas, especially in countries with lower academic ethics (probably all countries in the Central and Eastern Europe region fall into this category).

It is becoming increasingly common for researchers to share scientific literature via social media. Traditional bibliometrics have long been utilized to measure a study's academic impact, but they fail to capture the impact generated through social media sharing. Altmetric Attention Score (AAS) is a weighted count of all the online attention garnered by a study, and it is currently unclear whether a relationship with traditional bibliometrics exists. We identified the five highest-rated spine-specific and five highest-rated general orthopedic journals by Scopus CiteScore 2020. We then identified all the spine trauma studies across a 5-year span (2016-2020) within these journals and compared AAS with traditional bibliometrics using Independent t-tests and Pearson's correlational analyses. No statistically significant relationships were identified between AAS and traditional bibliometrics for articles pertaining to spine trauma: Level of Evidence (R = - 0.02, p = 0.34), H-Index Primary Author (R = < - 0.01, p = 0.50), H-Index Senior Author (R = - 0.04, p = 0.24), and Number of Citations (R = 0.01, p = 0.40). The top five articles by AAS include those pertaining to motorcycle injuries (AAS = 687), orthosis in thoracolumbar fractures (AAS = 199), golfing injuries (AAS = 166), smartphone-based teleradiology (AAS = 41), and auto racing injuries (AAS = 39). The lack of overlap between these types of metrics suggests that AAS or similar alternative metrics should be used to measure an article's social impact. The social impact of an article should likewise be a factor in determining an article's overall impact along with its academic impact as measured by bibliometrics.

This chapter identifies the four causes behind the failure to select the appropriate research initiatives in early stages of the innovation process: choosing nonholistic performance metrics to decide among projects, a lack of knowledge sharing among agents of the research center, and a lack of either academic or business experience in senior roles. Then, the author examines four practical tools that leading institutions are implementing to solve those problems at research centers: prioritizing projects based on a collection of academic, economic, and social impact metrics; mapping each researcher’s focus of study through a research map and incentivizing collaborations and sharing the best practices among them; using professional recruitment for academic and executive directors; and attracting an international advisory board.