Chapter 3: New Metrics for Measuring Academic Research Outside the Ivory Tower

The need to demonstrate the value of research programs is critical for funding sustainability, particularly in the 21st century when research funding is rarely guaranteed beyond the life of a single project. Since the great economic crash of 2008, many research programs have also diversified their funding portfolios, which means cultivating new relationships with funders and potentially different objectives of research projects. Measuring the impact of academic research outside academia is critical to providing a holistic view of a research program, but the methods to do so are still being figured out and are largely context specific. Within the field of transportation, no metrics for measuring the impact of research have really been established. Readily available and easily measured metrics, like citations or other scholarly impact factors, are not entirely appropriate to assess these kinds of research, since they hew to a narrow academic setting. This chapter proposes a methodology to track and measure the impact of research conducted by the University of California Institute of Transportation Studies (UC-ITS), a multi-campus research organization at US Berkeley, UC Davis, UC Irvine, and UC Los Angeles (UCLA). This methodology can be used beyond academic settings across an number of disciplines related to transportation topics.