As part of International Open Access Week, Brunel invites all academics and students to a conference which brings together industry professionals and Brunel researchers to talk about their commitment to making openness in research a reality.

Tune in to our livestream to catch a talk by Dr Teresa Jones and Dr Stephen Hanney from the Health Economics Research Group

Abstract:
The World Health Organisation (WHO) promotes Open Access as a way of spreading knowledge globally about health research, and increasing the chances of impacts arising. For over 20 years Brunel’s Health Economics Research Group (HERG) has conducted a range of studies to develop and apply the HERG Payback Framework for assessing the impact from health research. The framework has been applied in many countries, and we’ve continued methodological development. We’ve collaborated on this with WHO, informed HEFCE’s approach to impact case studies, and provided evidence to defend the public research budget.
One stream of this research has been to examine methods of assessing the impact of health research publications on clinical practice. Initially we identified the information sources and journals that clinicians used to inform their clinical practice, and explored the impact factors of these journals. Then, we examined the idea that citations could perhaps act like a radioactive tracer in following the development from an original piece of health research through to its effects on clinical practice i.e. from bench to bedside. We wanted to move beyond traditional quantitative citation analysis of an individual piece of research. In a study funded by the MRC Methodology Programme our research led us along a pathway that included both quantitative and qualitative elements to citation analysis and allowed us to trace important papers across generations of citations. We developed the HACT (HERG Assessment of Citations Template) and further refined it to provide a method of not only including a measure of quality into the assessment but also of assessing the direct and indirect impacts of a piece of health research. We conducted four case studies in the area of psychiatry to test our methodology.