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The purpose of this paper, using an evidence‐based management theoretical lens, is to examine research impact to provide guidance to supply chain management academics in evidencing and exploiting the outputs, outcomes and impact of their research.

Evidence‐based management theory is examined and applied to types of academic research impact. The distinction between academic and non‐academic impact is developed into a supply chain framework of research outputs, transfer, outcomes, impact and national/international benefits. Impact of supply chain management research is explored through a case study in the English National Health Service. Future opportunities and challenges for supply chain management researchers arising from increasing demand for and supply of evidence are discussed.

Author academic impact and citations are found to be increasingly important building blocks of evidence‐based evaluations of individual academics, journals, research quality assessments of groups and universities, and global rankings of universities. Supply chain management researchers can compare their impact with other areas of academia. Non‐academic impact of research has been assessed by funders of research projects and has spread to research quality assessments of universities.

Bibliometrics provide evidence of author and journal impact that can be used in human resource decisions, research quality assessments and global rankings of universities; this availability enables a debate on appropriate use of academic impact evidence. Supply chain management academics evidencing non‐academic research impact on business, society and economy will enable governments and funders of research to evaluate value for money return on their investment.

This perspective of evidence‐based evaluation of research impact and its implications might encourage debate on academic and non‐academic impact and encourage supply chain researchers to consider evidencing impact in their research design and methodology.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive understanding of scholarly discussions of academic publications on the social web and to further discuss the validity of altmetrics as a research impact assessment tool for academic articles.

Facebook posts citing psychological journal papers were collected for both quantitative and qualitative analyses. A content analysis approach was adopted to investigate topic preferences and motivations for scholarly discussions among academic and non-academic Facebook users.

Non-academic users were more actively engaged in scholarly discussions on Facebook than academic users. Among 1,711 Facebook users in the sample, 71.4 percent of them belonged to non-academic users, while 28.6 percent were from an academic background. The Facebook users cited psychological articles with various motivations: discussion and evaluation toward articles (20.4 percent), application to real life practices (16.5 percent), self-promotion (6.4 percent), and data source exchange (6.0 percent). However, nearly half of the posts (50.1 percent) were simply sharing articles without additional user comments. These results implicate that Facebook metric (a count of mentions of a research article on Facebook), as an important source of altmetrics, better reflects the attitudes or perceptions of the general public instead of academia.

This study contributes to the literature by enriching the understanding of Facebook metric as an academic and non-academic impact assessment tool for scientific publication. Through the content analysis of Facebook posts, it also draws insights into the ways in which non-academic audiences are engaging with scholarly outputs.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the non-academic impact in supply chain management (SCM) research through the application of three distinctive approaches to phenomenological methodology in different contexts.

Evidence-based examples from three case studies using interpretivist, social constructivist and critical realist methodologies are presented. They reflect non-positivist approaches commonly used in phenomenological methodology and adopted in SCM investigative research.

Different types of non-academic reach and significance from each research methodology are discussed to illustrate the non-academic impact benefits from each case. The three distinctive phenomenological approaches have been shown to contribute to innovative research methodology development on their own philosophical merit and produced novel contributions to SCM research in particular.

The non-academic impact examples have been shown to have wider influence and implication to business, the economy and society at large.

The paper highlights the relevance of phenomenological research methodology for SCM. It also contributes to the development of the SCM subject area and is hoped to encourage further reporting of non-academic impact of supply chain research.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between employee motivation and intention for knowledge sharing behaviour. Inter-generational differences (generations X and Y only) were assumed to moderate in the relationship between intention and knowledge sharing behaviour of non-academic staff of higher learning institutions. This research also aims to test the role of behavioural intention as mediation between motivation and knowledge sharing behaviour.

This research tested a conceptual framework derived from widely accepted theories. This study was carried out on non-academic staff working at the different higher learning institutions in Malaysia. Respondents from private and public higher learning institutions in Peninsular Malaysia were asked to complete a self-administered questionnaire. This research also applied confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modelling to examine the proposed hypothesis of this inquiry.

Results indicate that non-academic staff knowledge sharing behaviour was significantly mediated by intention between motivation and knowledge sharing behaviour relationship. More specifically, inter-generational differences (generations X and Y) play a significant moderation role between intention and knowledge sharing behaviour.

The generalizability of this cross-sectional study can be strengthened by adopting a longitudinal approach in the next phase of the study.

The results of this research highlighted that the higher learning institutions need to institutionalize knowledge sharing behaviour among their non-academic staff (executive and non-executive) by facilitating knowledge sharing-oriented work environment.

This paper has attempted to furnish a comprehensive understanding of knowledge sharing behaviour among the non-academic staff of higher learning institutions.

Many early-career researchers (ECR) are motivated by the prospect of creating knowledge that is useful, not just within but also beyond the academic community. Although research facilities, funders and academic journals praise this eagerness for societal impact, the path toward such contributions is by no means straightforward. In this essay, we address five common concerns faced by ECRs when they strive for societal impact. We discuss the opportunity costs associated with impact work, the fuzziness of current impact measurement, the challenge of incremental results, the actionability of research findings, and the risk of saying something wrong in public. We reflect on these concerns in light of our own experience with impact work and conclude by suggesting a “post-heroic” perspective on impact, whereby seemingly mundane activities are linked in a meaningful way.

The research landscape is rapidly changing and people need to evolve the way in which they think about publishing their work. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the new article type – the impact article – which is specifically designed to allow collaborators to showcase their impact work and also share learning about how impact is (or is not) achieved.

This introductory paper outlines the rationale for the impact article and explains its new structure, using examples from the very first set of five impact articles to be published in the journal.

There is a clear appetite for sharing and learning more about the reality of impact. Providing a facilitating structure to enable sharing, this study identifies five core building blocks to bringing about valuable impact: problem generation and identifying the impact to be achieved; working with stakeholders; the (co-)creation and learning process; impact outcomes; and the ethics of impact.

The new impact article type encourages authors to explore the impact process from start to finish, and to share learning about the process, including dealing with the unexpected and often changing nature of impact. These important learnings will inform future impact work, especially learning about what can (and cannot) be achieved and in what timeframes.

Collaboration is key to achieving impact. The new impact article aims to give voice to all stakeholders, through co-authorship opportunities and exploring the differences in perspectives on impact between stakeholders, including differing understanding of the ethics of impact. And to encourage multi-stakeholder co-creative working by enabling the sharing of best practice models and methods of collaborative working.

This new type of article aims to celebrate and make explicit the impact of research and so complements existing types of articles that might be separately published on the research itself. The impact article is designed to facilitate knowledge exchange about impact, not underlying research conceptualization and methodologies, but the challenge of designing, developing, tracking and demonstrating impact.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the similarities and differences between the Twitter users who tweeted on journal articles in psychology and political science disciplines.

The data were collected from Web of Science, Altmetric.com, and Twitter. A total of 91,826 tweets with 22,541 distinct Twitter user profiles for psychology discipline and 29,958 tweets with 10,478 distinct Twitter user profiles for political science discipline were used for analysis. The demographics analysis includes gender, geographic location, individual or organization user, academic or non-academic background, and psychology/political science domain knowledge background. A machine learning approach using support vector machine (SVM) was used for user classification based on the Twitter user profile information. Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modeling was used to discover the topics that the users discussed from the tweets.

Results showed that the demographics of Twitter users who tweeted on psychology and political science are significantly different. Tweets on journal articles in psychology reflected more the impact of scientific research finding on the general public and attracted more attention from the general public than the ones in political science. Disciplinary difference in term of user demographics exists, and thus it is important to take the discipline into consideration for future altmetrics studies.

From this study, researchers or research organizations may have a better idea on who their audiences are, and hence more effective strategies can be taken by researchers or organizations to reach a wider audience and enhance their influence.

Although supporting and assessing the non-academic “impact” of research are not entirely new developments in higher education, academics and research institutions are under increasing pressure to produce work that has a measurable influence outside the academy. With a view to supporting the solution of complex societal issues with evidence and expertise, and against the background of increased emphasis on impact in the United Kingdom's 2021 Research Excellence Framework (REF2021) and a proliferation of impact guides and tools, this article offers a simple, easy to remember framework for designing impactful research. We call this framework “The 7Cs of Impact” – Context, Communities, Constituencies, Challenge, Channels, Communication and Capture.

Drawing on core elements of the Policy Institute at King's College London's Impact by Design training course and the authors' practical experience in supporting and delivering impact, this paper outlines how this framework can help address key aspects across the lifecycle of a research project and plan, from identifying the intended impact of research and writing it into grants and proposals, to engaging project stakeholders and assessing whether the project has had the desired impact.

While preparations for current and future REF submissions may benefit from using this framework, this paper sets out the “7Cs” with a more holistic view of impact in mind, seeking to aid researchers in identifying, capturing, and communicating how research projects can and do contribute to the improvement in society.

Invocations of pure and applied science journals in the Web were analysed, focussing on commercial sites, in order to assess whether the Web can yield useful information about university‐industry knowledge transfer. On a macro level, evidence was found that applied research was more highly invoked on the non‐academic Web than pure research, but only in one of the two fields studied. On a micro level, instances of clear evidence of the transfer of academic knowledge to a commercial setting were sparse. Science research on the Web seems to be invoked mainly for marketing purposes, although high technology companies can invoke published academic research as an organic part of a strategy to prove product effectiveness. It is conjectured that invoking academic research in business Web pages is rarely of clear commercial benefit to a company and that, except in unusual circumstances, benefits from research will be kept hidden to avoid giving intelligence to competitors.