Of all the things the research record tries to capture, impact is the most resistant to counting. A citation is a number; a benefit to a patient, a policy, or a community is a story — and stories travel badly through systems built for tallies. Yet the demand to evidence impact has only grown, from national assessment exercises to funder expectations, and with it the need to represent impact as something more structured than a paragraph in a final report. This article sets out the main frameworks for capturing impact and engagement, drawing on the engagement, impact and SDG domain, and argues that even narrative impact has structure worth preserving.
The impact case study and the pathway to impact
The most developed apparatus for evidencing impact is the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF), whose impact case study has become a recognised genre in its own right. A REF impact case study is a structured narrative describing a specific instance of REF impact — an effect, change, or benefit beyond academia — underpinned by the institution’s research and evidenced rather than asserted. Its discipline is instructive: it names the non-academic beneficiary, traces the route from the underpinning research to the change, and supplies corroborating evidence. That is a far more rigorous object than a vague claim of influence.
Upstream of the case study sits the pathway to impact: a description of the planned route from a research output to a non-academic benefit. The pathway is forward-looking where the case study is retrospective, but both share a logic that planning frameworks make explicit. A Theory of Change articulates how a project’s activities are expected to lead to outcomes and impact, treating impact as a chain of reasoning that can be set down and examined, not a happy accident to be claimed at the end.
Involving the public: PPI, citizen science and co-production
Impact is rarely something done to a passive public; increasingly it is produced with them, and a precise vocabulary distinguishes the modes of involvement. Patient and public involvement (PPI) — the active involvement of patients and members of the public in the design and conduct of research, prominent in health research — is not the same as recruiting participants. A PPI partner shapes the research; a participant is studied by it. The distinction matters for credit as much as for method, and connects to the recognition of a patient or public partner as a genuine contributor rather than a subject.
- Citizen science is research conducted in part by members of the public, who contribute observations, classifications, or analysis — a mode that scales participation without conflating it with partnership.
- Co-production names research conducted jointly by researchers and beneficiaries, where the knowledge produced is genuinely shared rather than extracted, while community-based participatory research (CBPR) treats community members as full partners across the process.
These are not interchangeable, and a record that flattens them into “public engagement” loses information that matters for both assessment and ethics. The labour involved — knowledge mobilisation, the active translation and movement of research knowledge to its users — is itself a contribution that responsible assessment aims to make visible, the kind of work the authorship conversation has historically rendered invisible.
SDG alignment: a shared frame for relevance
Where impact case studies describe particular benefits, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) offer a shared frame for situating research against global priorities. SDG alignment is the mapping of research to one or more of the seventeen United Nations Sustainable Development Goals — from SDG 1 (No Poverty) through SDG 3 (Good Health and Well-being) to SDG 13 (Climate Action) and SDG 17 (Partnerships for the Goals). The appeal of SDG alignment is that it is a vocabulary the whole world already shares: a funder, an institution, and a government can all locate a piece of work against the same seventeen-point frame, which is precisely what a piece of free-text impact narrative cannot offer.
SDG alignment is powerful exactly because it is a common denominator. The risk is the same as its strength: applied loosely, almost any research can be tagged to almost any goal. Useful SDG metadata records a substantiated relationship, not an aspirational gesture — which is why the alignment, like the impact claim it supports, benefits from being evidenced rather than merely asserted.
Parallel framings exist in other systems — the EU’s Horizon Europe Mission areas play a comparable role within European funding — and the value in each case is the same: a controlled set of categories that lets relevance be stated comparably across institutions and borders.
Evidence is the hardest part, and here infrastructure is beginning to help. Policy uptake — documented use of research in policymaking — can be traced through the Overton database, which links scholarly works to the policy documents that cite them. Commercial routes have their own markers: a spin-out company formed to commercialise research, or a technology-transfer licence agreement. Each turns a claim of impact into something an assessor can follow back to its source.
Why this belongs in a metadata standard
It is tempting to conclude that impact is simply narrative and therefore beyond the reach of structured metadata. That conclusion is too quick. An impact case study has parts — the beneficiary, the underpinning research, the type of impact, the evidence, the SDG or mission alignment — and those parts can be represented as structured fields linked to the underlying outputs, projects, and people through persistent identifiers. Done that way, an institution can find all its work bearing on SDG 3, a funder can aggregate the beneficiaries of a programme, and a researcher’s engagement and co-production work becomes visible in their record rather than lost in prose. This is the same move that responsible assessment makes when it values contribution and context over a single counted number.
Where shared vocabulary fits
The terms here are routinely muddled: involvement is not participation, citizen science is not co-production, SDG alignment is not a free pass to tag anything to anything. A shared, federated vocabulary that defines these precisely — pointing to the REF for the impact case study, to established PPI frameworks for involvement, and to the United Nations for the SDGs — is what lets an impact claim made in one system be understood and compared in another. Supplying that definitional layer is the role the CASRAI dictionary is designed to play.
What to do now
For researchers: record impact as it accrues, naming the beneficiary, the mode of involvement, and the SDG alignment, with evidence attached rather than reconstructed at deadline. For institutions and funders: capture impact and engagement as structured, identifier-linked metadata so it can be aggregated and corroborated, not just narrated. For standards work: define the distinct modes of public involvement and the discipline of evidenced alignment, federating to the REF, the SDGs, and established PPI frameworks for the authoritative content.
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