Health Governance Review Vol. 30, Issue 2: Planning research dissemination and measuring research impact Free

Individual researchers and research organizations are actively searching for new ways to understand and measure their impact beyond academia; they examine the impact of research on communities, and investigate its potential to influence both policy and practice. As many other publishers, Emerald Publishing is “striving to help turn research into real-world change” and “have made attempts to bridge the gap between the researcher and policymaker communities” (Goodes and Broadley, 2022). Emerald is a signatory of The Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) which underscores the need to improve the ways in which researchers and the outputs of scholarly research are evaluated. Emerald has developed Impact Services – a collection of resources to help research studies better understand and plan research impact (https://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/impact-services). These include, for example, Impact Literacy Workbook, Institutional Healthcheck Workbook, blogs and podcasts. One of the Emerald journals – The European Journal of Marketing (EJM) – has introduced a new type of submission called impact articles (Keeling and Marshall, 2022). This new kind of article aims to make explicit the impact of research; thus, the article structure is different to a standard research article so that it explicitly focuses on understanding, designing, demonstrating and tracking impact.

Emerald is also helping its authors with tools and advice on better dissemination of their published research. When submitting manuscripts, the authors are advised to consult the Guide on “How to make your research easy to find with SEO (search engine optimization)” for choosing the appropriate title, abstract and keywords https://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/how-to/authoring-editing-reviewing/make-your-research-easy-find-seo. At this stage, authors are also advised on how to write a “Plain Language Summary”. After the article is published, the authors are getting recommendations on how to promote their research findings to new audiences.

The International Journal of Health Governance (IJHG) Review section’s standard format provides short reviews of each article included in the current issue. In this issue, we continue the updated format of our Review section introduced last year (when we interviewed some of our outstanding authors and early carrier authors) (MacVane Phipps, 2024a, b), and examine the views and real experience of three members of our Editorial Advisory Board (from Portugal, Indonesia and the Republic of Ireland) related to planning research dissemination and measuring impact of their research findings.

Dr Micaela Pinho is Associate Professor at the University Portucalense, Department of Economics and Management (DEG) (Porto, Portugal). She teaches courses in Microeconomics, Macroeconomics and Health Economics at undergraduate and graduate levels. Presently, she is an integrated member of the Research on Economics, Management, and Information Technology (REMIT), as well as a collaborator in the Instituto Jurídico Portucalense (IJP) and in the Research Unit in Governance, Competitiveness and Public Policies (GOVCOPP). Dr Pinho has published several articles in the IJHG during the last years (Pinho, 2021, 2023; Pinho and Borges, 2019; Pinho and Dias Costa, 2020; Pinho et al., 2022).

IJHG Editor: You have authored many research articles, conference papers and books. Which tools and methods to disseminate your research findings do you consider being most effective?

MP: Over the course of my academic career, I have explored various tools and methods to effectively disseminate research findings and ensure that they reach a wide audience – both academic and non-academic. In my experience, the most effective approaches include: (1) Open access publication – making research findings widely accessible via open access journals and repositories significantly increases visibility and readership; (2) Conferences and webinars – presentations at international conferences and participation in webinars promote direct exchange with peers, facilitate feedback and provide opportunities for collaboration, and (3) Collaboration with practitioners and policy makers – collaboration with government and private sector organizations helps to disseminate academic findings to a wider audience, including policy makers and industry professionals. In this regard, I make a lot of use of postgraduate courses in health economics. In these courses, I present articles that I have written and published.

It should be recognized that it is increasingly difficult to reach a wider audience these days as the speed at which research is produced is so fast that people cannot keep up and can only absorb a limited amount of information.

IJHG Editor: Are there any requirements at your university or department for planning research impact when starting a new research project or applying for research grants?

MP: While there are no rigid institutional requirements, best practices and funding guidelines encourage researchers to outline the potential impact of their work. The funding bodies require a clear impact strategy, detailing how the research will contribute to academic knowledge, policy development or societal change. This includes specifying dissemination plans, stakeholder engagement and expected benefits for the broader community. Moreover, researchers are encouraged to establish partnerships with policymakers, healthcare institutions and industry stakeholders to enhance the practical application of their findings. The university provides also institutional support concerning guidance on research impact planning. Overall, while formal requirements may vary, there is a strong institutional culture that values and promotes research impact, ensuring that academic findings translate into meaningful real-world contributions.

IJHG Editor: Are there any specific guides, tools, or services that you and your colleagues use for planning and measuring their research impact?

MP: Yes, my colleagues and I use a variety of guides, tools, and services to plan and measure research impact effectively. These resources help ensure that our findings reach the right audience and generate meaningful real-world contributions. Some of the most useful ones include: (1) University and research center guidelines – Our institution provides internal guidelines on research impact, (2) Bibliometric and Altmetric tools – We use platforms such as Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar to track citations and academic influence, (3) Open Access and Knowledge Repositories – Platforms like SSRN, ResearchGate, and institutional repositories facilitate broader dissemination and engagement beyond academia, and (4) SEO and digital visibility strategies – Following guides such as Emerald’s “How to make your research easy to find with SEO” helps optimize article titles, abstracts and keywords for better online discoverability. Using a combination of these approaches ensures that our research is both widely disseminated and meaningfully assessed in terms of its academic and societal contributions.

Dr Farah Purwaningrum is an affiliate with Kalta Bina Insani – a think tank on health financing and health policy in Indonesia. She is a lawyer and a researcher. Her research interests are in health policy, qualitative research methods, regulatory research and health services. At the moment, she is also a board member of International Sociological Association (ISA) – RC15 on the Sociology of Health. Farah has authored several papers and has published in the IJHG (Putri et al., 2024; Short et al., 2019).

IJHG Editor: Which metrics to assess research impact you and your colleagues use when planning and implementing your research projects?

FP: There are diverse metrics indeed. I understand that colleagues who are working at universities are bound by key performance indicators and organizational metrics. Whereas colleagues who are working at Think Tanks have indicators that are organizational and/or indicators set by donor organizations. There is a lot of pressure for researchers and lecturers in the global south/in Southeast Asia to publish their research in international journals that are indexed in Scopus and/or have high impact factor. Code of ethics and ethical approvals define research metrics too. Several international journals make it explicit that ethical approvals are a must for publishing. As a researcher, I think one needs to be aware of the usage and the ways in which these metrics work while at the same time maintain his/her independence.

IJHG Editor: How could new technologies help with assessing research impact in your field of research?

FP: New technology is like a double-edged sword. On the one hand, assessing research impact has to maintain its genuine contribution in that it fosters connection and tangible impacts needed to gauge the extent of research impact. Sociologists and Anthropologists are well aware of this. On the other hand, there are new epistemic cultures of new technologies as practised in enhanced data collection and analysis, for example, in social media analysis or usage of big data, advanced modeling and simulation, for instance, in agent-based modeling used by researchers in STEM as well as the growing use of altmetrics platforms and AI. AI can be used to analyze data produced by altmetrics data. In this sense, new technologies can be helpful in assessing the impact of research in my field of research. Notwithstanding this, I agree with Emerald Publishing’s stance on AI tools, namely ‘any use of AI tools within the development of an Emerald publication must be flagged by the authors) within the paper, chapter or case study’ ^[1]. By doing so, agency and transparency in the research process and research impact are maintained in light of the growing use of AI.

Dr Anna Chatzi is Associate Professor in the School of Nursing and Midwifery (University of Limerick, Ireland), with more than 20 years’ professional and academic experience, as a health professional (General Registered Nurse), a former Army Officer and an educational manager. Her research interests are in the field of patient safety, human factors, organizational psychology, nursing education, gender studies and quantitative research methods. Dr Chatzi has co-authored several papers, published in the IJHG (Chatzi and Malliarou, 2023; Chatzi and Kourousis, 2024; Kil et al., 2024).

IJHG Editor: Your articles published in the IJHG attracted a lot of attention from our readers (based on the number of downloads and Altmetric score). Which channels to disseminate your research findings are you and your colleagues using?

AC: I am very pleased to see that my work is attracting such attention. I believe this is a combination of factors, really. An outlet such as IJHG is a good start as it gives the platform for peer reviewed and credible work to be published. Of course, there is the journal’s readership, people who follow the IJHG publications, as they work and have special interest in these topics and areas of practice/research. And then there are the people that might not have been familiar with the journal or my work; these are the people that I would also like to present my work to. Publishing open access is a great advantage, as anyone can read freely the article online just by clicking on the link. Disseminating through LinkedIn and ResearchGate is a good start for me. There, I am connected with multiple professionals, students and academics, and always open to new connections, and of course fruitful discussions. Also, conferences (professional and academic) are another way to present and discuss my work; I am always happy to interact with people that are willing to debate and exchange opinions with me. Workshops and webinars give me the opportunity to link my work to most current material as well.

IJHG Editor: Which metrics to assess research impact in your field of research do you consider most promising and reliable? How could new technologies help with assessing research impact in your field of research?

AC: In academia, the number of peer-reviewed published papers and citations is a strong indicator of success. As a quantitative researcher myself, I love numbers and I really believe in them, but, in this case, looking at numbers only is not the answer. As a researcher, I would of course love to see these numbers grow for me, but I would also love, even more, to dig deep into each one of these citations and find that my work is truly appreciated and used for further research and/or for positive outcomes such as new policies or new health processes. I started my career as a healthcare professional, and aiming for results and positive output in healthcare is my main drive. At the moment, there are numerous ways, on numerous platforms, that the impact of research is assessed and the use of AI is very promising in this domain. For me, impact is when my work is discussed and used constructively.

IJHG Editor: How academic publishers could contribute to bridging the gap between research and policy?

AC: Policy needs the input of research, as it provides the evidence needed for making decisions. Policy makers already retrieve information from journals when it comes to informing their policies. However, I believe there is a communication issue between researchers and policy makers as well as jurisdiction issues that hinder full usability of research findings by policy makers. Governance is shaped by local/global engagement, as the policies differ between regions (such as the EU vs other parts of the world), between countries and EU states. Even within the same country we may see that health organizations have discretion to pursue different approaches. Thus, communicating locally and globally is important as there is a need to reach out to the various audiences, especially the policy makers and those implementing the policies, at various levels. Therefore, in principle, I believe that journal articles must be easy to follow by experts and non-experts; yet they need to be comprehensive, with qualitative and inferential statistical analysis (beyond descriptive statistics, which is the norm when it comes to decision making), as these are the most reliable tools when it comes to evaluating policies/etc.

IJHG is oriented to those concerned with policy-making and governance within government and academia, as well as in public, non-governmental or private healthcare systems or organizations. Three members of our Editorial Advisory Board provided brief professional biographies and responses to questions prepared by the Health Governance Review Editor. We hope that readers have enjoyed the opportunity to get to know those EAB members, who are also our active authors and peer-reviewers. Their experience related to planning research dissemination and measuring research impact in different countries and types of organizations could hopefully be useful to our readers and future authors.

Recent research shows that research impact could be broadly predictable, emphasizing a co-production “as a reasonably good mechanism for addressing the balance of predictable and unpredictable impact outcomes” (Yaqub et al., 2022).

New technologies are helping to produce and monitor different metrics, and to create new ways to assess impact within the research community. For example, authors can see now not only the number of citations of their publications but distinguish between different types of their use (e.g. citing research categories in Dimensions; Sage Policy Profiles; Semantic Scholar Highly Influential Citations). “One important indicator is when a paper is referred to in a law or policy document. This shows the research is directly affecting society’s approach to a subject” (Crotty, 2025). It was also shown that “news and blog mentions, social media engagement, and open access publications (excluding fully open access) significantly increase the likelihood of a research article being cited in policy documents” (Dorta-González et al., 2024). That indicator could be specifically relevant to health and clinical governance research. Specialized database like Overton Index (https://www.overton.io/policy-impact) could be helpful to track policy citations and find how your work is used by decision-makers.

To stay updated, we recommend DORA Resource Library – a collection of materials to facilitate the development of responsible research and researcher assessment policies and practices (https://sfdora.org/resource-library/).