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.
For researchers, knowing where and how their work matters is critical. This information can determine the direction of future investigations and the trajectory of careers.
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.
“Sage Policy Profiles is intended to allow researchers to easily see where their work is being used in the real world, specifically in global policy, and to illustrate and share that impact graphically,” said Camille Gamboa, Sage associate v-p of corporate communications.
“The data that the tool presents provides a rich narrative and a more complete picture of research impact than citation-based metrics alone,” she explained in a recent interview for CCC’s Velocity of Content podcast.
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 means they can calculate a real-world impact.
However, citing Goodhart’s Law—“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”—Gamboa emphasized, “We aren’t trying to create a new metric. We are absolutely trying to make it easy for researchers, their communities, institutions, and funders to understand more thoroughly the value of their work.”
Not surprisingly, researchers in the social and behavioral science community view the impact of their work differently than colleagues working in the hard sciences. Policy documents matter to them.
“If you rely only on citation-based metrics to measure the success of research, you’re ignoring other areas of impact," Gamboa said. "That’s doubly the case for social and behavioral science,”
“Using its own data on the topic, along with that of the OpenAlex database, Overton compared mean scholarly citations per publication to mean policy citations per publication. In the STM disciplines, there are many more scholarly citations than there are policy citations, while in political science and psychology, sociology, the difference is small. Interestingly, in business and economics, there are considerably more policy citations than academic citations.”
Using Sage Policy Profiles, researchers may export data to document policy mentions as well as create personalized, shareable citation dashboards with maps and graphs that showcase how their academic work is helping to build evidence-based policy.
In early testing, Gamboa said, researchers have cited interest in using these results on personal websites; in front of tenure and promotion committees; and in grant proposals.
“Researchers can go to socialsciencespace.com/Sagepolicyprofiles, where they’ll the instructions to get started. It’s fast, it’s easy, and it’s completely free,” she added.
Sage has elsewhere asserted that the definition of research impact needs to evolve. The SAGE Policy Profiles tool, said Gamboa, is one way to advance that objective.
“Sage is a mission-driven company founded on the belief that science and education can and should improve the world. We’re also an independent company, which means that we can experiment. We can invest long-term in tools like the Sage Policy Profiles because we believe it is the right thing to do,” she said.
“We hope that tools like the Policy Profiles used in combination with other needed action will disrupt our citation-obsessed culture so that we better recognize the real-world impact of research.”
Christopher Kenneally is host of Velocity of Content, CCC’s podcast series.
