James Wilsdon on impacts, responsible metrics & evaluation practices

James Wilsdon is a Professor of Research Policy in the Department of Politics and Director of Impact and Engagement for the Faculty of Social Sciences, and Associate Director in the Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures at the University of Sheffield in the UK. He has been involved in many policy and think tank initiatives. Of particular interest here, he chaired an independent review of the role of metrics in the management of the UK’s research system, publishing a final report in 2015 called The Metric Tide. More recently he has chaired an expert panel on Next Generation Metrics for the European Commission. In this conversation we talk about his experiences working in both policy think tanks and in academia, about the increasing focus on research impact for academics and how the UK has created some culture change in this direction. He also discusses issues around metric-based systems of assessments for academics and calls on us not to indulge processes of evaluation that we know empirically are bad science.“Impact is a team sport.”“A new breed of brokers and boundary spanners … placing a premium on a skillset that is not the traditional academic skillset.”“Metrics are a technology and there is nothing intrinsically good or evil in them, it’s all about how they are used.”“It is incumbent on us not to indulge processes of evaluation that we know empirically are bad science.”He talks about (times approximate) …01:40 Introduction of background as professor of research policy, politics of science and research and director of research impact for faculty of social sciences; and working outside of academia as director of science policy for the Royal Society03:40 Moving from an academic context, working out of academia in policy jobs, and keeping a foot in academia through PhD and collaborations, and then coming back into the academic system proper; not being strategic about PhD and future plans when at the think tank; bridging brokering skills becoming more valued as academia more concerned with impact06:55 Moving from think tank to university – pluses and minuses of both; pace and speed of think tank, shorter cycles, but can be too swayed by pressures of speaking to think tank audiences; in university time for longer deeper research when you get the funding; just different; think tank more proximate to power and potential to impact policy debates, in university setting harder to earn that seat at the table; impact.10:30 About having impact as an academic? His role is facilitating academics having impact, part networks, part credibility; for faculty supporting academics at different career stages to strengthen their approach; also in the UK, the Research Excellence Framework (REF) that has 20% of its weighting on impact and needing to think about impact case studies now for next REF cycle; an industry of box ticking around the REF just as much as anywhere else; argues reason to do impact is not the REF but to have real impact, as starting point, so starting with the substance14:30 Describing REF – institutional assessment done at disciplinary or departmental level, university makes subject-based submissions to a particular panel eg politics that assesses research outputs over 6-7year period of all the politics departments in the country...

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