Sharing research with academia and beyond: Insights from early career researchers in Australia and Japan

Abstract

Quality scholarly research outputs, such as peer reviewed journal articles published in reputable journals, are essential for early career researchers' (ECRs) vocational success while also offering benefits for their institutions. Research outputs destined for audiences beyond academia are also increasingly valued by funders, end users, and tertiary institutions. While there is an expectation that ECRs may create diverse research outputs for an array of audiences, the kinds of research output texts produced by ECRs for varied audiences warrants further investigation. In addition, the routes of dissemination that ECRs use to share their academic research outputs to secure impact beyond academia are not well understood. Drawing on semi-structured interviews of 30 respondents in Australia and Japan, we explore the research-sharing practices of ECRs, finding that ECRs may potentially create a wide range of research-informed texts for end users beyond academia, using an array of methods for dissemination. The examples of the output text types and dissemination routes we provide in this paper can be used to inspire ECRs and also more senior academics to share their research more broadly, and perhaps more effectively, and can be used by publishers to improve research impact and support ECRs' research translation.

National comparisons of early career researchers' scholarly communication attitudes and behaviours

“…Shehata (2019), too, investigated scholarly communication behaviour among social sciences scholars but also among humanities scholars, comparing for the purpose Egyptian and Saudi Arabian researchers' practices. Merga and Mason (2020) looked at sharing research practices among Australian and Japanese ECRs and found that, while ECRs may use a range of media to communicate outside of academia, they need more support and training. These studies, obviously limited in their generalizability to the entire scholarly community, as their respective participants do not represent many countries or even all major disciplinary areas, nevertheless indicate that scholarly communication practices vary by country, with institutional policies and processes frequently associated with the choices made.…”

Perspectives on institutional valuing and support for academic and translational outputs in Japan and Australia

“…In addition to the previously listed differences, academic systems may vary greatly between the nations in relation to factors such as academic mobility (Yonezawa, Horta, & Osawa, 2016), as well as the underpinning values of the academic systems. With the researchers of this study working in Australian and Japanese universities, these two nations were also convenient for the choice of nations (Merga & Mason, 2020a), also bringing in situ understanding of academia systems as a participant. Finally, both researchers were ECRs at the time of conducting this project, and thus, they also had recent lived experience of producing diverse research outputs in their academic contexts that they could draw upon to interpret the responses.…”

Should Google Scholar be used for benchmarking against the professoriate in education?

“…In contemporary academia, these so-called "low quality" publications do have a different kind of value, as there is increasing impetus for researchers to demonstrate translation and dissemination of their work in such accessible forms (e.g. Merga and Mason 2020), and therefore these contributions, while lacking the rigour of peer-reviewed academic work, may gain value over time, and this value can often also be quantitatively measured through altmetrics. That said, the prevalence of outputs that cannot be deemed scholarly by current standards limits the use of GS, particularly because it is "very time-consuming, to manually clean every academic's record by merging stray citations and removing non-academic publications" (Harzing and Alakangas 2016, p. 802).…”