Frequently Asked Questions

SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Timely.

When planning the impact for your research, make sure your project and objectives meet those five goals.

Budgeting your research's impact is a crucial part of planning to ensure your research reaches and influences the intended audience effectively. Budgets vary depending on your activities, needs and fundings. Here, we provide general guidelines to help you get started.

Before anything else, make sure to define your research impact goals by identifying your target audience and outlining your impact objectives.

1. Plan your impact activities

• Dissemination: Plan how you will share your research findings (e.g., academic publications, conferences, workshops, webinars, social media).
• Engagement: Engage with stakeholders through focus groups, advisory boards, or collaborative projects.
• Communication: Develop communication materials such as policy briefs, infographics, videos, and press releases.

2. Allocate resources accordingly

• Personnel Costs: Budget for salaries, stipends, or consultancy fees for those involved in dissemination and engagement activities.
• Event Costs: Include costs for organizing and attending conferences, workshops, and other engagement events (e.g., venue hire, travel, accommodation, catering).
• Communication Costs: Consider expenses for designing and producing communication materials, maintaining a website, and utilizing social media platforms.
• Monitoring Costs: Will you need to set aside a budget to track your impact? The UG's Research Intelligence Services are free to all university members, but if you decide to use metrics and tools other than those provided by us, you will need to take this into account in your research impact budget.

For more in-depth advice on budgeting and funding, contact the funding team.

The Field-Weighted Citation Impact is the ratio of the total citations actually received by an entity (researcher, research group, department, university, etc), and the total citations that would be expected based on the average of the subject field (see Scopus knowledgebase ). As such, it provides a "level playing field" for comparison as publications are compared to the average in their particular field, type and publication year.

However, when analyzing a larger publication set, simply calculating the average FWCI for this set can be very misleading especially when making a comparison between two such sets produced by two similar research groups. In cases like this, we recommend that you instead look at and plot the frequency distribution of the FWCIs of the publication set. For a clear example and more details, see "Profiles, not Metrics " paper published by the Web of Science Institute for Scientific Information (Jan, 2019).

When conducting bibliometric analysis, we often stress the importance of field-weighted indicators as these ensure fair comparison across document type, publication year and research area.

However, a blog post posted on the Bibliomagician platform recently exposed a subtle difference in Scival when computing field-weighted citation percentiles compared to the traditional bibliometric approach.

In a nutshell, instead of using total citation counts for each publication in the dataset under analysis, Scival uses citation ratios. Moreover, Scival merges subject areas before computing the top percentiles. As noted by the blog post authors, Scival’s method doesn’t lead to very different results for large datasets. However, it certainly affects the analysis for small datasets especially when that set includes publications from more subject areas, which have very different citation distributions.

We strongly encourage anyone using Scival to carefully read the whole blog post and send us any additional questions that may arise.

Research findings and innovations come in many forms, and one way for it to have a societal or academic impact is by creating a research-based product. This can be an app, a software, a patented design, a start-up, etc. Such product can potentially be commercialized.

We at RISe do not provide support for such endeavour, but you can find facilitators here:

• RUG Ventures (investment company)

• Campus Groningen (incubator)

• UMCG's Innovation Center (for health innovations)

• Sustainable Startup Academy (course with practical tools)

That's a great way to disseminate your research! The University of Cambridge has put together a quick-guide on how to get started.