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Moderated conference on impact assessment of agricultural research: May 2014

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Moderated conference on impact assessment of agricultural research <[log in to unmask]>
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Thu, 29 May 2014 11:45:51 +0200
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I am Birge Wolf, from the Faculty of Organic Agricultural Science of the University of Kassel, situated in Witzenhausen, Germany.



Thanks a lot for organizing this very interesting e-mail conference. I am very delighted about all these competent and reflective contributions – I will need some more time to read them all.



I would like to contribute to all the messages about issues that influence the impact of agricultural research, findings about lack in knowledge transfer and adequate participative approaches of research and focus on the networks of innovations that are needed to achieve impact.



An important influence on the impact of agricultural research is the inner-scientific reputation system, which is based on citation-based performance indicators. Though a narrow view on scientific impact does neither assess societal or broader impact nor serve as a proxy for it. Accordingly, researchers have to deal with trade-offs in contributing their time and resources towards activities that increase the likelihood of societal impact or to force to achieve scientific impact, while only the latter serves reputation. As long as this will remain the situation, funders will often gain less societal impact with their research than they need or expect.



Ex post impact assessment (epIA) is conducted, because Impact is desired, but can epIA produce “take home values” which researchers can use to show evidence that their approaches have impact in real life? Can epIA result in certificates, prizes or additional funding? Can epIA results be fed in any way into a current Research Information Systems (CRIS)? (CRIS are informational tools to provide, manage and disseminate research information. The main tasks are to enter data only once, and make them usable for different purposes, also for evaluation. CRIS are increasingly used by institutions and interoperability between CRIS and with other systems like open-access-repositories. See also http://www.eurocris.org/Index.php?page=concepts_benefits&t=1). Or can CRIS be expanded to an extent that reduces the effort of data collection for epIA and can used by research institutions and funders to acknowledge researchers contributions for practice on society ? Would it in future be possible to look from a publication on the one side to the open data for verification and on the other side towards the contributions for and the impact on practice and society?



In a German Project within our institution together with the Center for Evaluation, Saarbruecken, we are working on evaluation beyond scientific impact in the meaning to balance incentive effects. There we focus on improved documentation to serve evaluation beyond scientific impact. The aim of our research project is to compile the data needed for evaluation beyond scientific impact, structure them in coherence to already developed standards of current Research Information Systems (e.g. CERIF) and develop a conjunction of these data to the documentation requirements in proposals and reports (until now we focus on the requirements of German federal research with some interlinks to EU). For those who might be interested in this, see Wolf et al (2013, 2014). [CERIF refers to the Common European Research Information Format (http://cordis.europa.eu/cerif/) ...Moderator]. 



Dipl. Ing. agr. Birge Michaela Wolf

Universität Kassel-Witzenhausen

Fachbereich Ökologische Agrarwissenschaften Fachgebiet Ökologischer Land- und Pflanzenbau Nordbahnhofstr. 1 a D - 37213 

Witzenhausen

Germany

e-mail: birge.wolf (at) uni-kassel.de

fon: 0049 (0)5542 - 981536

fax: 0049 (0)5542 - 981568



References:

- Wolf, B., Lindenthal, T., Szerencsits, M., Holbrook, J.B.; Heß, J. 2013. Evaluating research beyond scientific impact: How to include criteria for productive interactions and impact on practice and society. GAIA - Ecological Perspectives for Science and Society, 22: 104-114. http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/oekom/gaia/2013/00000022/00000002/art00009 



- Wolf, B., Szerencsits, M., Gaus, H., Müller, C.E. and Heß, J. 2014. Developing a documentation system for evaluating the societal impact of science. 12th International Conference on Current Research Information Systems (Rome, May 13-15, 2014). Procedia Computer Science. http://dspacecris.eurocris.org/jspui/bitstream/123456789/186/1/13_Wolf_et_al_CRIS2014_Rome.pdf (0.5 MB)



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