About the impact of research

Abstract

When a researcher asks himself that first question that will become a protocol, he does not know what he will find at the end of the road. He may have a working hypothesis, but the reality is that the real world is very peculiar and the answers obtained may not be the ones expected. However, that is the purpose of any research: to arrive at a discovery, without forgetting that we work with probabilities and not with absolute truths.
What we fail to contemplate is that this chain of processes and decisions goes beyond the "Results" section of the article we hope to write. Once we put the fruit of our work on paper, we are turning it into a material for global use and it can be used in many ways. It can be leveraged by healthcare staff members in the management of their patients or serve as an educational element in residency programs around the world. In both scenarios we see a glimpse of the impact and scope of the effort undertaken in initiating a research project.

Sage Policy Profiles is part of the Social Science Space network and recently published a very useful tool (https://policyprofiles.sagepub.com) that can be used to answer this question. It allows you to search for a researcher's articles and determine in which public policy papers they have been mentioned. This simple exercise will open their eyes by showing them the immense scope of their studies and, at the same time, serves as a reminder of the importance of executing their protocols to the best of their ability.

What is published is not a bunch of pages full of letters. It is distilled knowledge, shaped to aid in the advancement of science. As such, it will not stay in the institution where you work. It will spread around the world, crossing borders and changing the attention of people who will never know his name.
Let's change the world one article at a time.