Social Impact Ex-Post Evaluation Protocol

Abstract

Measuring the societal impact of research has become a key issue in scientific research worldwide. Most competitive research funding agencies demand societal impact in research proposals. We must not only bring science closer to the public, but also make it improve the condition in which the science is found. But how can we measure the societal impact of a research once it has been completed? Through this article we present the Social Impact ex-post Evaluation Protocol (SIEP), a proposal of a tool to gather and measure the social impact of research. It is based on the qualitative work developed in the framework of NET4IMPACT, a Research Network on the Social Impact of Science. The work was developed applying communicative methodology, comparing across disciplines, and culminating in the establishment of a tool that can help in the measurement of societal impact from a great diversity of scientific areas.