The assessment of research quality based on numerical parameters is a pandemic that has spread among institutes and governments on all continents today. Academic work and scientific exploration are drastically unlike business activities in profitable organisations (i.e. corporations): The former is a job of discovering new knowledge, whereas the latter is a kind of “modern slavery” fitted into established rules and practices. Among all parameters in research quality assessment frameworks, the most unreasonable and delusional is measuring “social impact”. Summarised in plain language, the policymakers consider your research pointless if the public does not have an awareness of your achievement.
(My PhD subject is a narrow field in the academic community. Even so, there are still thousands of papers published in tens of relevant international journals every year, not to mention the number of papers and journals on prominent subjects such as quantum optics and reinforcement learning. Policymakers in the Ministry of Science and Technology want everyone to give up their hobbies and daily activities to read academic journals.)
We should admit that measuring “social impact” is an arcane assessment parameter. Since it is about “social” impact, it must be about the coverage outside the academic community. Most of the people outside academia are not professionals in calculus and quantum fields, and human is a kind of animal acquiring information based on visualisation and relevance to daily necessaries. As such, different scientific subjects have different intellectual accessibility to the public.
The most successful subjects in this field are astronomy, physics, geography, earth sciences, biology (zoology) and environmental sciences. They are popular because they are usually communicated with vivid visual effects, and the objects involved are visible to us every day. However, we should see that public communication on these subjects is rarely about a specific paper or research project of a specific research group in a specific research institute. As such, although the social impact of these subjects is fantastic, the social impacts of individual research projects are limited, if not negligible. You can guess the reactions of the public when they see that calculus in the journal papers, and very few people care about the collision between two neutron stars 50,000 light years from the Earth.
As for other STEM subjects, the so-called “social impact” is probably zero compared to the aforementioned natural sciences. Most engineering research projects are focused on very tiny details which are beyond people’s daily activities. As a matter of fact, the public takes new technologies for granted; we are excited about the new launch of SpaceX and the release of the new iPhone. But if there are several engineering professors lecture about their research on the battery optimisation, which shares just a tiny part in the new iPhone, people will not get interested or excited. Most people, with decent visual effects and communication materials, can understand the basic scientific principles behind the day-to-day products, but it is difficult to understand the technical details of a research paper. It is almost impossible to let ordinary people understand the “social impact” of a research paper in engineering, which is one of the thousands of papers every year.
When it comes to mathematics, its “social impact” is probably a dark humour. Popularising mathematics can be easy, but giving a specific paper “social impact” is impossible. Most people struggle to understand quadratic equations, then how could mathematicians stimulate them to get excited about their new publications on cryptography and Hamiltonian mechanics? Our human nature is that we only care about the subjects relevant to us. Scientists cannot boost “social impact” by boasting how “relevant” their subjects are, especially when their subjects are beyond people’s daily cognition.
The situation for humanities and social sciences is probably the same as STEM subjects. The public can be attracted by some basic stories in sociology and history and classical arts. But people don’t have the mood to listen to a paper discussing who the uncle of the Pope Innocent III actually was, or a paper predicting that China will crumble into seven smaller nations in the next decade due to sociological factors consistent with Max Webber’s theory.
Apart from the nature of different scientific subjects, the parameters in the “social impact” measurement are questionable. Common parameters in research quality assessments include the number of citations, the number of filed patents, the quantity of media exposures and the value of knowledge transfer to businesses. All of these numerical parameters should be suspected of their effectiveness.
If the social impact of a research project is measured with its number of citations, then it is not measuring its social impact. Because the citations must be coming from other academic journal papers. As for media exposure, it is totally perverted from one’s scientific work. A new research finding that one type of nails on A350 should be shrunk for 0.015 mm will absolutely not appear on any public media because it will waste both the publishers’ and readers’ time. The assessment of application value and business value of a research project is utterly unfair for researchers in theoretical sciences, social sciences and humanities. The scientists who detected gravity waves for the first time will never have any chance to file their patents or transfer their discoveries as property to a company, unless they decide to play scientists in a sitcom.
Another reality disallowing objective “social impact” measurement is time. Many revolutionary research projects were not aware even inside academia. Their prospects and applications were recognised and witnesses decades after their first appearances. Under these circumstances, when the social impact of a sensational research work is eventually recognised, the original pioneers might have lost their jobs a long time ago due to the immediate assessments of their research.
At the end, lest we forget the power of the internet. Most of the people, not only young people, acquire new knowledge via YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat and Google. Today, if we want to understand a complex scientific concept or the content of a renowned research project, we just have to search for the videos which provide beautiful visualisation. This is how the public outside academia absorb knowledge. The mode of academic communication, such as lectures and journal papers, does not comply with natural human cognition. For this reason, if governments and institutes honestly care about “social impact”, they should reflect on the rigid and obsolete academic bureaucracy and formulae rather than squander scientists’ time on preaching the gospel.
Unseen Variables 
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