New Metrics for Measuring Academic Research Outside the Ivory Tower

The need to demonstrate the value of research programs is critical for funding sustainability, particularly in the 21st century where research funding is rarely guaranteed beyond the life of a single project. After the great economic crash of 2008 many research programs have also diversified their funding portfolios, which means cultivating new relationships with funders and potentially different objectives of research projects. Measuring the impact of academic research outside academia is critical to providing a holistic view of a research program, but the methods to do so are still being figured out and are largely context specific. Within the field of transportation, no metrics for measuring the impact of research have really been established. Readily available and easily measured metrics, like citations or other scholarly impact factors are not entirely appropriate to assess these kinds of research, since it hews to a narrow academic setting. This chapter proposes a methodology to track and measure the impact and research of beyond academic settings across a number of academic disciplines related to transportation conducted by the University of California Institute of Transportation Studies (UC-ITS), a multi-campus research organization at UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC Irvine, and UCLA. The methodology is designed to be adaptable for use by other research groups that straddle academia and the public sector, regardless of the disciplines involved.