CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: knowledge mobilisation

  • Capturing research impact: REF case studies, PPI and SDG alignment

    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.

    Related reading

  • Knowledge mobilisation: translating research into policy and practice

    There is a comfortable assumption, still widespread, that good research speaks for itself — that if findings are sound and published, the world will notice and act. The reality is otherwise. The distance between a finding sitting in a journal and that finding changing a policy, a clinical practice or a professional routine is often vast, and it is rarely crossed by accident. Bridging it is a discipline in its own right, variously called knowledge mobilisation, knowledge translation or knowledge exchange: the deliberate, skilled work of moving research into the hands of the people who can use it, in a form they can act on. This article examines that work, drawing on the engagement, impact and SDG domain of the CASRAI Dictionary.

    Why dissemination is not enough

    For a long time the implicit model of getting research used was a one-way push: do the research, publish it, perhaps issue a press release, and assume uptake will follow. This model fails repeatedly, and understanding why is the starting point for everything else. Practitioners and policymakers are busy, work under different pressures and timescales than researchers, and rarely read academic journals. Research findings often arrive in a form — long, hedged, technical — that is ill-suited to a decision that must be made next week. And evidence almost never speaks with one voice; using it well requires interpretation, contextualisation and judgement about how it applies in a particular setting. Simply making research available, in short, does very little. Getting it used requires actively engaging with the people who might use it, understanding their needs, and shaping the evidence so it can inform what they actually do.

    The Knowledge-to-Action cycle

    One of the most widely used frameworks for thinking about this is the Knowledge-to-Action cycle, which models how knowledge moves from creation into application. It distinguishes the knowledge creation process — in which raw research is refined and synthesised into more usable forms such as syntheses and tools — from an action cycle of activities involved in applying knowledge: identifying a problem and the relevant knowledge, adapting it to the local context, assessing barriers and facilitators to its use, selecting and tailoring interventions, monitoring use, evaluating outcomes, and sustaining the change. The framework’s great value is that it treats application as an active, iterative process with its own steps, rather than as something that simply happens once research exists. It makes clear that adapting knowledge to context, and attending to the barriers in a particular setting, are not afterthoughts but central to whether evidence ever gets used.

    Tools of the trade

    Knowledge mobilisation has developed a repertoire of practical instruments and tactics. Among the most important:

    • Policy briefs. Short, accessible documents that distil what the evidence says on a question into a form a policymaker can absorb quickly — framed around the decision at hand, clear about implications, honest about uncertainty.
    • Plain-language summaries. Versions of research stripped of jargon and written for a non-specialist audience, so that the substance is reachable by those who need it.
    • Engaging users early. Involving the eventual users of research — practitioners, policymakers, communities — in shaping the questions and the work from the outset, so the research is relevant and the relationships exist when it is time to act.
    • Tailored interaction. Workshops, briefings, secondments and sustained relationships that move evidence through conversation and trust rather than through documents alone.

    What these share is a recognition that mobilisation is relational and active. Evidence travels through people and relationships, not merely through publications.

    Boundary organisations and brokers

    Because the worlds of research and practice differ in language, culture and incentives, a special role has emerged to span them: that of the boundary organisation and the knowledge broker. Boundary organisations sit deliberately between research and policy or practice, translating in both directions, building relationships, and helping each side understand the other. Knowledge brokers are the individuals who do this work — people fluent in both worlds who can interpret research for users and convey users’ needs back to researchers. Their importance reflects a hard-won lesson: the gap between knowledge and action is often best bridged not by asking researchers to become communicators or policymakers to become scholars, but by sustaining intermediaries whose explicit job is to connect the two. Investing in these connective roles is frequently what turns sporadic, accidental uptake into reliable flow.

    Mobilisation as part of impact

    Knowledge mobilisation is closely tied to the wider conversation about research impact — the difference research makes beyond academia — but it is the active practice rather than the retrospective measurement. Where impact assessment asks what difference research made, mobilisation asks how to make that difference happen, and does the work of bringing it about. The two are complementary: mobilisation is the cause, demonstrable impact often the effect. Recognising mobilisation as skilled, valuable work in its own right — rather than as something researchers should do in their spare time — is part of valuing the full range of what research careers involve, a theme explored in our resources on research practice and impact.

    Recording mobilisation consistently

    For mobilisation activity to be recognised, planned and connected to the research and people behind it, it has to be describable in consistent terms across institutions, funders and reporting systems — what was produced, for whom, through what route, with what uptake. That consistency is what the CASRAI Dictionary provides: a shared vocabulary so that engagement and mobilisation activities are understood the same way wherever they are recorded. And because translating research into use is genuine, often substantial contribution, the work can be described within the same framework as every other — the CRediT taxonomy and its full set of contribution roles. Producing knowledge is only half the task; mobilising it — deliberately, skilfully, in partnership with those who can use it — is how research earns its keep in the world.