For most of the twentieth century, research impact meant one thing: citations by other researchers. That measure still matters, but it captures only a fraction of what research can achieve — and funders, governments and universities across the world now expect to see reach far beyond the academy. A study that changes clinical practice, informs policy, or improves lives in a community can be transformative while barely registering in citation counts.
This guide is about maximising both kinds of impact: the scholarly influence that builds your reputation among peers, and the societal reach increasingly demanded by the systems that fund and assess research. The specifics vary — the UK's Research Excellence Framework weighs impact explicitly, US funders like the NIH and NSF ask for broader impacts, the European Research Council and Horizon Europe value dissemination — but the principle is global. Explore the full Research, Publishing & Impact collection, and pair this with our guide to building a research agenda that is impactful by design.
Redefining impact: scholarly and societal
It helps to think of impact in two connected dimensions. Scholarly impact is your influence within your field — citations, invitations, the extent to which other researchers build on your work. Societal impact is the difference your research makes beyond academia — in policy, practice, industry, public understanding, or people's daily lives. The two are not in tension, but they require different strategies, and academics who pursue only the first leave much of their potential contribution unrealised.
Both dimensions start with the same foundation: work that is genuinely good and genuinely important. No amount of promotion rescues trivial research, and the surest route to impact is to work on questions that matter and answer them well. But even excellent work has no impact if no one finds it, understands it, or can act on it — which is where deliberate effort, the subject of this guide, comes in. Assessment frameworks such as the UK's Research Excellence Framework now define impact explicitly as effects on the economy, society, culture, policy and beyond.
Making your work discoverable
The most brilliant paper is worthless if the people who need it cannot find it. Discoverability is a set of unglamorous but decisive habits. Register and maintain an ORCID iD so that all your work is unambiguously linked to you regardless of name changes or shared names — a particular problem for researchers with common names or non-Western naming conventions. Keep your profiles on scholarly networks and your institutional page current and complete.
Beyond identity, invest in the metadata that makes work findable: a clear, keyword-rich title; an abstract written so that search engines and non-specialists alike can grasp the contribution; and consistent author naming across everything you publish. These are small efforts with outsized returns, because they compound across every paper you will ever write. Discoverability is the cheapest form of impact work and the most neglected — a few good habits established early pay dividends for an entire career.
Open access and reaching real audiences
Research locked behind paywalls cannot reach the practitioners, policymakers, journalists and members of the public who might act on it — and cannot reach researchers in institutions, especially across the Global South, whose libraries cannot afford subscriptions. Open access dramatically widens the potential audience for your work, and a growing number of funders now mandate it. Understanding your options — gold open access, green self-archiving in a repository, and the many diamond or no-fee journals — lets you maximise reach without necessarily paying large article-processing charges.
Where article fees are unaffordable, which is the reality for many academics worldwide, green open access via your institutional or subject repository is a free and legitimate route to the same end: deposit the accepted manuscript so anyone can read it. Always check the specific journal's policy and your funder's requirements, and keep the version you are permitted to share. For how open practices connect to teaching, see our guide to open educational resources.
Translating research for non-specialists
Societal impact almost always requires translating your work for people who do not read journals. The policymaker, the clinician, the teacher, the community organiser — none of them will decode a technical paper, so the burden of translation falls on you. This means learning to write and speak about your research in plain language: leading with why it matters and what it means, not with methods and caveats, without distorting or overclaiming.
Concrete channels multiply your reach: a plain-language summary alongside each paper, a piece in an outlet like The Conversation, a policy brief for the relevant agency, an accessible talk, or engagement with practitioners in your field. Not every academic enjoys this work, but even modest, targeted effort dramatically extends who your research can influence. Pick the one or two channels that fit your temperament and your audience rather than attempting all of them poorly.
Measuring impact with more than citations
To manage and evidence impact you must measure it, and citations alone are a narrow and slow gauge. Scholarly metrics — citations, h-index, journal indicators — still matter for some purposes but should be read critically and never treated as a full measure of worth. Alongside them, a broader family of indicators captures reach that citations miss: downloads and readership, mentions in policy documents, media and social coverage captured by altmetrics, uptake by practitioners, and documented changes in practice or policy.
Track these as you go rather than scrambling to reconstruct them later. The AcademicStaff publication ledger lets you record each output alongside its evolving metrics — scholarly and societal — so that the evidence for your impact accumulates automatically instead of being pieced together in a panic before a grant or promotion deadline. What you can measure, you can improve and demonstrate; what you never tracked is lost.
Building an impact case for funders and promotion
Increasingly, funders and promotion panels ask not just what you published but what difference it made — and the academics who can answer with evidence have a decisive advantage. A compelling impact case tells a clear story: here was the problem, here is what my research found, here is how it reached the people who could use it, and here is the change that followed. Vague claims of importance persuade no one; specific, evidenced narratives do.
Build the case continuously. Keep records of who used your work and how, gather testimonials from practitioners or policymakers who acted on it, save the media coverage and policy citations, and note the concrete outcomes. When a grant application or promotion case requires an impact statement, you will then be assembling evidence you already have rather than inventing a story after the fact. For how impact weighs in advancement, see our guide to promotion criteria. Treated as an ongoing habit rather than a deadline scramble, impact becomes a natural by-product of doing important work visibly.
The Research Impact Tracker & Dissemination Checklist
A free toolkit to log both scholarly and societal impact for every paper, plus a step-by-step dissemination checklist covering ORCID, open access, plain-language summaries and the evidence you will need for your next grant or promotion case.
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Frequently asked questions
Do citations still matter, or is it all about societal impact now?
Both matter. Citations and scholarly metrics remain important for reputation and some assessment purposes, but funders and universities increasingly also expect evidence of societal impact — effects on policy, practice, industry or public life. The strongest researchers pursue both, and treat citations as one indicator among many rather than the whole picture.
What if I cannot afford open-access article fees?
Use green open access: deposit the accepted manuscript of your paper in your institutional or subject repository, which is free and makes the work openly readable. Many quality journals also charge no fees at all (diamond open access). Always check the journal's self-archiving policy and your funder's requirements before deciding.
How do I evidence research impact for a grant or promotion?
Tell a specific, evidenced story: the problem, what your research found, how it reached the people who could use it, and the change that followed. Collect the evidence continuously — testimonials, policy citations, media coverage, documented outcomes — so you are assembling proof you already have rather than reconstructing a narrative under deadline pressure.
The AcademicStaff editorial team writes practical, evidence-based guidance for university staff — drawing on sector reporting, funder guidelines and the lived administrative reality of academic work. Every guide is reviewed for accuracy against current Australian higher-education practice.