Accounting for universities’ impact: using augmented data to measure academic engagement and commercialization by academic scientists
File(s)
Accepted version
Published version
Author(s)
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
We present an approach that aims to comprehensively account for scientists’ academic engagement and commercialization activities. While previous research has pointed to the economic and social impact of these activities, it has also been hampered by the difficulties of accurately quantifying them. Our approach complements university administrative records with data retrieved from external sources and surveys to quantify academic consulting, patenting, and academic entrepreneurship. This allows us to accurately account for ‘independent’ activity, i.e., academic engagement and commercialization outside the formal university channels and often not recorded by universities. We illustrate this approach with data for 10,000 scientists at Imperial College London. Results indicate that conventional approaches systematically underestimate the extent of academic scientists’ impact-relevant activities by not accounting for independent activities. However, with the exception of consulting, we find no significant differences between individuals involved in supported (university-recorded) and independent activity, respectively. Our study contributes to work concerned with developing appropriate and accurate research metrics for demonstrating the public value of science.
Date Issued
2015-09-08
Date Acceptance
2015-07-09
Citation
Research Evaluation, 2015, 24 (4), pp.380-391
ISSN
1471-5449
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Start Page
380
End Page
391
Journal / Book Title
Research Evaluation
Volume
24
Issue
4
Copyright Statement
© The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
License URL
Sponsor
Engineering & Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC)
Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC)
Commission of the European Communities
Natural Environment Research Council (NERC)
Identifier
http://rev.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2015/09/08/reseval.rvv020.full.pdf+html
Grant Number
EP/F036930/1
ES/G038082/1
252018 - IEF 2009
NE/L013134/1
Subjects
Science & Technology
Technology
Information Science & Library Science
academic engagement
commercialization
university-industry relations
academic entrepreneurship
TECHNOLOGY-TRANSFER
INDUSTRY
KNOWLEDGE
ENTREPRENEURSHIP
UK
SCIENCE
GERMANY
EUROPE
Science Studies
0807 Library And Information Studies
1605 Policy And Administration