Statistics or narrative description?
Statistics are usually just a small part of an impact report, application or CV, and are only indicators of a certain aspect (productivity, use etc.).
- Statistics may not reflect everything that is important or impactful about your work/career; qualitative description may be better for showing broad contributions to research and society, your career path, or vision.
- For some publication types or fields, reliable statistics are not available.
Consider if statistics are the best way to show what you want to show - or is a narrative approach explaining your work, impact and career more appropriate? Or could you combine both? You can contact your local research advisor (forskningsrådgiver) for advice; for external funding, check guidelines and support from the BOA-team. For CV advice, see FERD100 Creating an Academic CV.
A changing landscape?
There is a push for more responsible use of indicators in research assessment, which is likely to change practices and reduce focus on traditional statistics. The European Commission has published a scoping report Towards a reform of the research assessment system
Lenker til eit ekstern område. and institutions are signing the Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment
Lenker til eit ekstern område.. Narrative CVs have been implemented/piloted by several funders, for example the Dutch Research Council, NIH (USA), Science Foundation Ireland, UK Research and Innovation, and the Swiss National Science Foundation. In Norway, NOR-CAM – A toolbox for recognition and rewards in academic careers
Lenker til eit ekstern område. was published in 2021.
News about narrative CVs
- Woolston (2022) Time to rethink the academic CV [Career feature]. Nature. doi: 10.1038/d41586-022-00928-4 Lenker til eit ekstern område.
- Chawla (2022) Swiss Funder unveils new CV format to make grant evaluation fairer [Career news]. Nature. doi: 10.1038/d41586-022-01599-x Lenker til eit ekstern område.
Resources and examples: "Impact" and statistics
- For external funding, UiBs BOA-team have impact specialists who can give advice.
- Andrews (2022) Why I wrote an impact CV [Career column]. Nature. doi: 10.1038/d41586-022-00300-6 Lenker til eit ekstern område.
- In fields where connections between research and "societal impact" are not direct, statistics (such as the number of policy documents citing your work) may not reflect impact. Such statistics also rely on uptake of your work (which is hard to control) rather than what you have done as a researcher (which you can control). If appropriate, describing your activities might be more informative ("what have you done about your discovery"; Weatherall & Giblin 2021 Lenker til eit ekstern område., p12). Weatherall & Giblin give examples such as "involving stakeholders in research from the start, giving public lectures or academic conference presentations, writing articles for blogs or news media or creating other accessible content (like podcasts), making data accessible to stakeholders, creating reports or pamphlets to disseminate key findings to practitioner or industry audiences, providing training, or arranging meetings and workshops with policymakers".
- Even for publication types and fields with fairly good statistics (e.g. medicine), statistics don't always reflect what you consider to be your impact. See the image "I am not my h-index" below, from Stephen Curry on Twitter Lenker til eit ekstern område. :
