Communicating knowledge:How and why UK researchers publish and disseminate their findings

Abstract

Researchers are driven by a desire to enhance our knowledge and understanding of the world we inhabit, and to communicate their findings to others. But both governments and other funders are increasingly interested in demonstrating the social and economic returns from their investments in research, and in assessing research performance. The many different criteria for success, and the lack of any consensus on how success should be assessed or measured, however, mean that researchers often find themselves in receipt of confused or conflicting messages. And they are pulled in different directions in deciding which channels of communication they should adopt. How researchers publish and why Researchers publish and disseminate their work in many different ways: through formal publication in books and in learned and professional journals; through conferences and their proceedings; and through a variety of less formal means, now including web-based tools for social networking. The choices they make are underpinned by a number of interrelated motives beyond the simple desire to pass on their findings to those who may be interested in them. These motivations include the desire not only to maximise dissemination to a target audience, but to register their claim to the work they have done, and to gain peer esteem and the rewards that may flow from that. Specific requirements from funders, or institutional guidelines, or pressure from co- authors or collaborators, are much less influential. In deciding when, where and how to communicate their work, researchers may have to make choices between speedy dissemination to a desired audience, and less speedy publication in a high-status journal. Such choices are made more complex because researchers know that publications serve not only as means of communication. They can be monitored or measured as indicators of quality or impact (in the academic world and more widely). And the difficulty in choosing between different channels of communication is exacerbated because researchers often find the messages they get from different agencies, including universities, conflicting or unclear. But the perception that their work is being monitored and assessed in particular ways, notably by the RAE, has a major influence on how they communicate. Articles in scholarly journals are more easily ranked and measured using a series of readily-available and increasingly- sophisticated metrics; and it is partly because of that – especially in disciplines where they have not predominated in the past – that they have come to dominate all other forms of publication. Yet there is a rich array of other kinds of output employed and valued by researchers, and many feel uncomfortable with the dominance of the article – particularly the article published in a high-status journal. They are concerned that communications through other channels – especially those that are better-suited to applied or practice-based research, and to communicating with non-academic audiences – seem to have low status and prestige in the academic world. The only major exceptions to the dominance of the journal article are the continuing high status attached to monographs and edited volumes in the humanities, and to practice-based outputs in the arts. Yet even in the humanities, journal articles are now by far the largest publication format by volume; although books continue to be highly valued, including in submissions to the RAE, there are increasing concerns about the decline of the book, attributed variously to shrinking library purchase budgets, publishers’ reluctance, and by some, to the pressures of the RAE.