Harry Potter and the Draft Engagement and Impact Guidelines

This week the Australian Research Council released for consultation their draft guidelines for the evaluation of university research engagement and impact. The engagement part of the evaluation is mainly quantitative with a shortlist of indicators around research income from industry and end-users. The impact part of the evaluation is mainly qualitative with research impact case studies providing a narrative around the benefit that university research is having outside of the university sector - including the ways that universities are fostering translation and impact from their research.

Some interesting takeaways from the draft guidelines include:

• A May/June 2018 submission deadline (which follows directly behind the ERA 2018 deadline)
• A maximum of 25 impact case studies per university which includes 23 disciplinary case studies, 1 interdisciplinary case study and 1 Aboriginal research case study
• The introduction of a low volume threshold of 150 weighted outputs (books weighted x5) over which a university must submit information and below which a university may opt-in if they so wish
• A new three point rating scale for impact (high, medium, low) which seems more sensible than the pilot ratings (mature, emerging, limited)
• Impact case studies will now receive 2 ratings each - one for the approach to impact and another for the impact itself

Adding to the sector's resource burden in complying with research evaluation is the introduction of two engagement narratives: one is an engagement indicator explanatory statement of 4,500 characters to accompany engagement indicators and the other is a 7,000 character engagement narrative to accompany each unit of assessment. Now seeing as each unit of assessment is the 2-digit field of research this results in a considerable increase in work for the sector. In ERA 2015 there was a total of 656 2-digit FORs evaluated - so if each one of these is accompanied by a 4,500 character explanatory statement and a 7,000 character engagement narrative this equates to around 7.5 million characters, or around 1.2 million words - for comparison, the entire series of Harry Potter books contain around 1.08 million words.

You can see the guidelines for yourself at the ARC website here.

Engagement and Impact Assessment Pilot 2017 Report

The ARC have today released their final report on the Engagement and Impact Assessment Pilot conducted in early 2017.

Changes suggested for the full assessment in 2018 include:

Field of Research 11 - Medical and Health Sciences will be split in two which means two case studies can be submitted bringing the total maximum to 25 (1 for each of the 22 FOR + an extra one for '11' plus an interdisciplinary and Aboriginal research case study)

Four engagement indicators will be used for the engagement part of the assessment:

• cash support from end-users
• total HERDC income per FTE (specified schemes)
• end-user sponsored grants: proportion of HERDC Category 1
• research commercialisation income (selected FoR codes only).

It is encouraging to finally see a definition for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander research:

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander research means that the research significantly relates to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, nations, communities, place, culture or knowledge.

However, the ARC will continue to consult with its Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander stakeholders to further refine the definition.

You can read the report at the ARC's website here: http://www.arc.gov.au/ei-pilot-overview