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Writing a submission to government
Universities are strongly emphasising the impact agenda. For legal academics, impact can often take the form of contributing to law reform. Sometimes, our area of law is not on the agenda, and achieving impact may require direct emailing or contacting policy advisors or politicians to try to attempt to bring an issue onto the political agenda (with variable levels of success). At other times, though, our area of expertise is the subject of law reform inquiries, consultations, or legislative reform processes. In this case, there is arguably an important public benefit to us writing submissions to government, drawing on our scholarly expertise. This is important for research impact, but also to help…
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Tracking impact
Universities are increasingly attuned to the ‘impact’ agenda – seeking to measure and quantify the impact of our work on society. The Australian Research Council defines ‘research impact’ as ‘the contribution that research makes to the economy, society, environment or culture, beyond the contribution to academic research.’ In many fields, ‘impact’ is measured through citation counts. This is problematic for multiple reasons: self-citations can ‘game’ citation counts (and are included in most citation measures); and a highly cited article could be cited a lot because it is so bad! So use citation data with caution. Also, we need to contextualise any impact data in the context of our field; so…


