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Portfolio

Digital Science and Knowledge Transfer (2020 survey)

A survey on communication and collaboration practices of researchers.

Partner
Digital Business University of Applied Sciences (DBU), Alexander von Humboldt Institut für Internet und Gesellschaft (HIIG)
Unsere Rolle
Forschungsdesign, Datenerhebung, Analyse und Publikation
Zeitraum
2020–2021
Beteiligte
Benedikt Fecher, Marcel Hebing und das Projektteam am HIIG
Visualisierung der Studie zu digitaler Wissenschaft und Wissenstransfer

Background

The survey examined how researchers in Germany understand societal impact and which communication and collaboration formats they use. It was a collaboration between the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG) and the Digital Business University of Applied Sciences (DBU).

Approach and deliverables

The project team surveyed 499 researchers in Germany on their pathways to societal impact, i.e. their attitudes towards impact policies, their societal goals and use of engagement formats. This survey focuses on the communication and collaboration practices of researchers.

The study and its results are described in How do researchers approach societal impact?, published at PLOS ONE.

The documented deliverables are the German and English questionnaires, an anonymised dataset and the peer-reviewed publication linked below.

Project team

Principal investigators and their affiliations during the project:

  • Dr. Benedikt Fecher (HIIG), Head of Research Programme Knowledge & Society.

  • Prof. Dr. Marcel Hebing, Professor of Data Science at Digital Business University of Applied Sciences (DBU) and Founder of Impact Distillery.

Instrument and data

  1. Questionnaire: Digital Science and Knowledge Transfer (EN, 2020)
  2. Questionnaire: Digital Science and Knowledge Transfer (DE, 2020)
  3. Dataset: Digital Science and Knowledge Transfer (full responses, German participants, excluding open questions)

The dataset is also available on Kaggle.

REF Coding

The Research Excellence Framework (REF) is the UK's system for assessing the quality of research in UK higher education institutions. In the design of the questionnaire we reused results from a qualitative coding of the REF Impact Case Studies, conducted by Natalya Sokolovska, Sascha Schönig, Elias Koch, Nicole Bosse and Benedikt Fecher at the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society and as part of the BMBF-funded project IMPaQT.

The data underlying the coding can be found on the webpage of The Higher Education Funding Council for England (REF Impact Case Studies). The coding of the project team at HIIG can be found here: HIIG coding materials

The coding of the REF Impact Case Studies was originally carried out as part of a qualitative study with students. In the survey, we use the main categories Effects and Formats to construct the questions on impact goals (Effects) and formats.

Publications