By Daniel J. Hicks
Why do familiar metrics of impact often seem “thin” or to miss the point of research designed to address real-world problems? Is there a better way to measure the social impact of research?
In a recent paper (Hicks et al., 2018), my coauthors and I identified a key limitation with current metrics and started to look at how concepts from philosophy — specifically, ethics — can help us explain the goals of our research, and potentially lead to better metrics.
What’s the problem?
To understand the limitations of current metrics for measuring the social impact of research, it is useful to understand two distinctions, between resources and goals and between inward-facing and outward-facing goals for research.