Interesting article and leader in this week’s Times Higher on the topic of impact, both of which carry arguments that “university managers” have over-reacted to the impact agenda. I’m not sure whether that’s true or not, but I suspect that it’s all a bit more complicated than either article makes it appear.
The article quotes James Ladyman, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bristol, as saying that university managers had overreacted and created “an incentive structure and environment in which an ordinary academic who works on a relatively obscure area of research feels that what they are doing isn’t valued”.
If that’s happened anywhere, then obviously things have gone wrong. However, I do think that this need to be understood in the context of other groups and sub-groups of academics who likewise feel – or have felt – undervalued. I can well understand why academics whose research does not lend itself to impact activities would feel alienated and threatened by the impact agenda, especially if it is wrongly presented (or perceived) as a compulsory activity for everyone – regardless of their area of research, skills, and comfort zone – and (wrongly) as a prerequisite for funding.
Another group of researchers who felt – and perhaps still feel – under-valued are those undertaking very applied research. It’s very hard for them to get their stuff into highly rated (aka valued) journals. Historically the RAE has not been kind to them. The university promotions criteria perhaps failed to sufficiently recognise public engagement and impact activity – and perhaps still does. While all the plaudits go to their highly theoretical colleagues, the applied researchers feel looked down upon, and struggle to get academic recognition. If we were to ask academics whose roles are mainly teaching (or teaching and admin) rather than research, I think we may find that they feel undervalued by a system which many of them feel is obsessed by research and sets little store on excellent (rather than merely adequate) teaching. Doubtless increased fees will change this, and perhaps we will hear complaints of the subsequent under-valuing of research relative to teaching.
So if academics working in non-impact friendly (NIFs, from now on) areas of research are now feeling under-valued, they’re very far from alone. It’s true that the impact agenda has brought about changes to how we do things, but I think it could be argued that it’s not that the NIFs are now under valued, but that other kinds of research and academic endeavour – namely applied research and impact activities (ARIA from now on) – are now being valued to a greater degree than before. Dare I say it, to an appropriate degree? Problem is, ‘value’ and ‘valuing’ tends to be seen as a zero sum game – if I decide to place greater emphasis on apples, the oranges may feel that they have lost fruit bowl status and are no longer the, er, top banana. Even if I love oranges just as much as before.
Exactly how institutions ‘value’ (whatever we mean by that) NIF research and ARIA is an interesting question. It seems clear to me that an institution/school/manager/grant giving body/REF/whatever could err either way by undervaluing and under-rewarding either. We need both. And we need excellent teachers. And – dare I say it – non-academic staff too. Perhaps the challenge for institutions is getting the balance right and making everyone feel valued, and reflecting different academic activities fairly in recruitment and selection processes and promotion criteria. Not easy, when any increased emphasis on any one area seem to cause others to feel threatened.
"You will make sure that your research methodology links with your research questions, you snivelling little maggot!"
This week I was asked to be involved in a Research Grant application ‘bootcamp’ to talk in particular about the use of social media in pathways to impact plans, and academic blogging in general. I was quick to disclaim expertise in this area – I’ve been blogging for a while now, but I’m not an academic and I’m certainly not an expert on social media. I’m also not sure about this use of the word ‘bootcamp’. We already have ‘workshop’ and ‘surgery’ as workplace-based metaphors for types of activity, and I’m not sure we’re ready for ‘bootcamp’. So unless the event turns out to involve buzzcuts, a ten mile run, and an assault course, I’ll be asking for my money back.
But I thought I’d try to put together a list of resources and examples that I was already aware of in time for the session, and I then I wondered about ‘crowdsourcing’ (i.e. lazily ask my readers/twitter followers) some others that I might have missed. Hopefully we’ll then end up with a general list of resources that everyone can use. I’ve pasted some links below, along with a few observations of my own. Please do chip in with your thoughts, experiences, tips, and recommendations for resources.
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Things I have learnt about using social media
Blogging
You must have a clear idea about your intended audience and what you hope to achieve. Blogging for the sake of it or because it’s flavour of the month or because you think it is expected is unlikely to be sustainable or to achieve the desired results.
A good way to start is to search for people doing a similar thing and contact them asking if you can link to their blog. Everyone likes being linked to, and this is a good way to start conversations. Once established, support others in the same way.
You have to build something of a track record of posts and tweets to be credible as a consistent source of quality content – you’ve got to earn a following, and this takes time, work, and patience. And even then, might not work. Consider a ‘soft launch’ to build your track record, and then a second wave of more intensive effort to get noticed.
Posting quality comments on other people’s blogs, either in their comments section, or in a post on your blog, can be a good way to attract attention.
Illustrate blog posts with a picture (perhaps found through google images) – a lot of successful bloggers seem to do this.
Multi-author blogs and/or guest posts are a good way to share the load.
And consequently, offering guest posts or content to established blogs is a way to get noticed.
The underlying technology is now very straightforward. Anyone who is reasonably computer literate will have little trouble learning the technical skills. The editing frame where I’m writing this in looks a lot like Word, and I’ve used precisely no programming/HTML stuff – that can all be automated now.
Twitter
The technology of @s and # is fairly straightforward to pick up – find some relevant/interesting people to follow and you’ll soon pick it up, or read one of the guides below.
A good way to reach people is to get “retweets” – essentially when someone else with a bigger following forwards your message. You do this by addressing posts to them using the @ symbol
Generally the pattern of retweets seems to be when people find something interesting and it suits their message. So… the ESRC retweeted my blog post linking to their regional visit presentation when my blog post said nice things about the visit and linked to their presentation
Weird mix of personal and professional. Some twitter accounts are uniquely professional, others uniquely personal, but many seem a mixture. Some of the usual barriers seem not to apply, or apply only loosely. Care needs to be taken here.
General
Social media is potentially a huge time sink – keep in mind costs in time versus benefits gained
It can be a struggle if you’re naturally shy and attention seeking doesn’t come easily to you
Some of the links and choices of examples, are more than a little University of Nottingham-centric, but then this was an internal event. I’ve not checked with the authors of the various resources I’ve linked to, and taken the liberty of assuming that they won’t mind the link and recognition. But happy to remove any on request.
Any resources I’ve missed? Any more thoughts and suggestions? Please comment below….
A quick opening note on terminology: We use ‘referee’ or ‘assessor’ to refer to academics who read and review research grant applications, then feed their comments into the final decision-making process. Terminology varies a bit between funders, and between the UK and Australia. We’re not talking about journal referees, although some of the advice that follows may also apply there.
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There are funding schemes that offer applicants the opportunity to respond to referees’ comments. These responses are then considered alongside the assessors’ scores/comments by the funding panel. Some funders (including the Economic and Social Research Council [ESRC] in the UK) have a filtering process before this point, so if you are being asked to respond to referees’ comments, you should consider it a positive sign as not all applications get this far. Others, such as the Australian Research Council (ARC), offer you the chance to write a rejoinder regardless of the level of referees’ reports.
If the funding body offers you the option of a response, you should consider your response as one of the most important parts of the application process. A good response can draw the sting from criticisms, emphasise the positive comments, and enhance your chances of getting funding. A bad one can doom your application.
And if you submit no response at all? That can signal negative things about your project and research team that might live on beyond this grant round.
The first thing you might need to do when you get the referees’ comments about your grant application is kick the (imaginary) cat.* This is an important process. Embrace it.
When that’s out of your system, here are four strategies for putting together a persuasive response and pulling that slaved-over application across the funding finish line.
1. Attitude and tone
Be nice. Start with a brief statement thanking the anonymous referees for their careful and insightful comments, even if actually you suspect some of them are idiots who haven’t read your masterpiece properly. Think carefully about the tone of the rest of the response as well. You’re aiming for calm, measured, and appropriately assertive. There’s nothing wrong with saying that a referee is just plain wrong on a particular point, but do it calmly and politely. If you’re unhappy about a criticism or reviewer, there’s a good chance that it will take several drafts before you eliminate all the spikiness from the text. If it makes you feel better (and it might), you can write what you really think in the tone that you think it in but, whatever you do, don’t send that version! This is the version that may spontaneously combust from the deadly mixture of vitriol and pleading contained within.
Preparing a response is not about comprehensively refuting every criticism, or establishing intellectual superiority over the referees. You need to sift the comments to identify the ones that really matter. What are the criticisms (or backhanded compliments) that will harm your cause? Highlight those and answer them methodically (see below). Petty argy-bargy isn’t worth spending your time on.
2. Understanding and interpreting referees’ comments
One UK funder provides referee report templates that invite the referees to state their level of familiarity with the topic and even a little about their research background, so that the final decision-making panel can put their comments into context. This is a great idea, and we would encourage other funding agencies to embrace it.
Beyond this volunteered information (if provided), never assume you know who the referee is, or that you can infer anything else about them because you could be going way off-base with your rant against econometricians who don’t ‘get’ sociological work. If there’s one thing worse than an ad hominem response, it’s an ad hominem response aimed at the wrong target!
One exercise that you might find useful is to produce a matrix listing all of the criticisms, and indicating the referee(s) who made those objections. As these reports are produced independently, the more referees make a particular point, the more problematic it might be. This tabled information can be sorted by section (e.g. methodology, impact/dissemination plan, alternative approaches). You can then repeat the exercise with the positive comments that were made. While assimilating and processing information is a task that academics tend to be good at, it’s worth being systematic about this because it’s easy to overlook praise or attach too much weight to objections that are the most irritating.
Also, look out for, and highlight, any requests that you do a different project. Sometimes, these can be as obvious as “you should be doing Y instead”, where Y is a rather different project and probably closer to the reviewer’s own interests. These can be quite difficult criticisms to deal with, as what they are proposing may be sensible enough, but not what you want to do. In such cases, stick to your guns, be clear what you want to do, and why it’s of at least as much value as the alternative proposal.
Using the matrix that you have prepared, consider further how damaging each criticism might be in the minds of the decision makers. Using a combination of weight of opinion (positive remarks on a particular point minus criticisms) and multiplying by potential damage, you should now have a sense of which are the most serious criticisms.
Preparing a response is not a task to be attempted in isolation. You should involve other members of your team, and make full use of your research support office and senior colleagues (who are not directly involved in the application). Take advantage of assistance in interpreting the referees’ comments, and reviewing multiple drafts of your response.
Don’t read the assessor reports by themselves; you should also go back to your whole application, several times if necessary. It has probably been some time since you submitted the application, and new eyes and a bit of distance will help you to see the application as the referees may have seen it. You could pinpoint the reasons for particular criticisms, or misunderstandings that you assumed they made. While their criticisms may not be valid for the application you thought you wrote, they may very well be so for the one that you actually submitted.
3. The response
You should plan to use the available space in line with the exercise above, setting aside space for each criticism in proportion to its risk of stopping you getting funded.
Quibbles about your budgeted expenditure for hotel accommodation are insignificant compared to objections that question your entire approach, devalue your track-record, invalidate your methodology, or claim that you’re adding little that’s new to the sum of human knowledge. So, your response should:
Make it easy for the decision-makers: Be clear and concise.
Be specific when rebutting from the application. For example: “As we stated on page 24, paragraph 3…”. However, don’t lose sight of the need to create a document that can be understood in isolation as far as possible.
If possible and appropriate, introduce something that you’ve done in the time since submission to rebut a negative comment (be careful, though, as some schemes may not allow the introduction of new material).
Acknowledge any misunderstandings that arise from the application’s explanatory shortcomings or limitations of space, and be open to new clarifications.
Be grateful for the positive comments, but focus on rebutting the negative comments.
4. Be the reviewer
For the best way to really get an idea of what the response dynamic is all about in these funding rounds, consider becoming a grant referee. Once you’ve assessed a few applications and cut your teeth on a whole funding round (they can often be year-long processes), you quickly learn about the demands of the job and how regular referees ‘value’ applications.
Look out for chances to be on grant assessment panels, and say yes to invitations to review for various professional bodies or government agencies. Almost all funding schemes could do with a larger and more diverse pool of academics to act as their ‘gate-keepers’.
Finally: Remember to keep your eyes on the prize. The purpose of this response exercise is to give your project the best possible chance of getting funding. It is an inherent part of many funding rounds these days, and not only an afterthought to your application.
* The writers and their respective organisations do not, in any way, endorse the mistreatment of animals. We love cats. We don’t kick them, and neither should you. It’s just an expression. For those who’ve never met it, it means ‘to vent your frustration and powerlessness’.
I’ve disabled comments on this entry so that we can keep conversations on this article to one place – please head over to the Research Whisperer if you’d like to comment. (AG).
The Russell brand apparently has quite an appeal....
The Russell Group announced today that the Universities of Durham, Exeter, York, and Queen Mary University of London have been offered and accepted membership, taking the group from 20 to 24. The 1994 group – their former mission group home – has yet to announce whether they will rename themselves the 1990 group or look to make some new signings of their own. There’s a fair few out-of-contract unaffiliated universities who are up for grabs, so perhaps that will be the next logical step.
Christopher Cook, the Education correspondent of the Financial Times, reported the story thusly on twitter:
Russell Group to expand to include universities everyone thought were already in it – Durham, Exeter, QMUL and York.
… which I think sums it up nicely. Speaking of Twitter, it’s surely a sign of something when ‘Russell Group’ starts to trend. It’s very odd reading the spambots tweeting about it as well – clearly the realignment of HE mission groups is a hot topic in the world of the internet fraudster and spammer. Trending is normally reserved for topics that I’m reliably told are related to a Canadian singing beaver, footballists who have done a goal, celebrities who have just died, the twoutrage du jour, One Directioners – presumably a re-branding of the Girl Guides – and wretched, wretched Saturday night reality television.
Getting ‘Russell Group’ trending is a sign that the LSE Impact Blog’s mission to get every last academic on Twitter by 2014 is well on track. And when we see Bertram Russell trending, we’ll know they’ve finally won. Or that Twitter has gone the way of MySpace.
*Insert your own hilarious and inaccurate joke about how long energy saving lightbulbs take to warm up here*
I’ve had an idea, and I’d like you, the internet, to tell me if it’s a good one or not. Or how it might be made into a good one.
Would it be useful to set up a central list/blog/twitter account for ongoing research projects (including student projects) which need responses to an internet questionnaire from the general public? Would researchers use it? Would it add value? Would people participate?
Every so often, I receive an email or tweet asking for people to complete a research questionnaire on a particular topic. I usually do (if it’s not too long, and the topic isn’t one I consider intrusive), partly because some of them are quite interesting, partly because I feel a general duty to assist with research when asked, and partly because I probably need to get out more. The latest one was one which a friend and former colleague shared on Facebook. It was a PhD project from a student in her department about sun tanning knowledge and behaviour, and it’s here if you feel like taking part. Now this is not a subject that I feel passionately about, but perhaps that’s why it might be useful for the likes of me to respond.
I guess the key assumptions that I’m making are that there are sufficient numbers of other people like me who would be willing to spend a few minutes every so often completing a web survey to support research, and that nothing like this exists already. If there is, I’ve not heard about and I’d have thought that I would have done. But I’d rather be embarrassed now rather than later! Another assumption is that such a resource might be useful. I strongly suspect that any such resource would have a deeply atypical demographic – I’d imagine it would be mainly university staff and students. But I’d imagine that well designed research questionnaires would be asking sufficiently detailed demographic information to be able to factor this in. For some student projects where the main challenge can be quantity rather than variety, this might not even matter too much. I guess it depends what questions are being asked as part of the research.
I’ve not really thought this through at all yet. I would imagine that only projects which could be completed by anyone would be suitable for inclusion, or at least only projects where responses are invited from a broad range of people. Very specific projects probably wouldn’t work, and would make it harder for participants to find ones which they can do. Obviously all projects would need to have ethical approval from their institution. There would be an expectation that beneficiaries are prepared to reciprocate and help others in return. And clearly there has to be a strategy to tell people about it.
In practical terms, I’m thinking about either a separate blog or a separate page of this one, and probably a separate twitter account. Researchers could add details in a comment on a monthly blog post, and either tweet the account and ask for a re-tweet, or email me a tweet to send. Participants could follow the twitter feed and subscribe to the comments and blog.
So… what do you think? Please comment below (or email me if you prefer). Would this be useful? Would you participate? What have I missed? If I do set this up, how might I go about telling people about it?
Interesting article and leader in this week’s Times Higher on the topic of impact, both of which carry arguments that “university managers” have over-reacted to the impact agenda. I’m not sure whether that’s true or not, but I suspect that it’s all a bit more complicated than either article makes it appear.
