Revisiting: Measuring Societal Impact or, Meet the New Metric, Same as the Old Metric - The Scholarly Kitchen

" Every five or so years, I feel an urgent need to rewrite the same post explaining the fallacy behind a piece of research solely by its “societal impact”. The first was in 2014, followed by the piece below from 2018. It’s come back onto my radar after attending several science policy meetings where some speakers were emphasizing it, and from recent posts such as Mark Huskisson’s report from the Munin Conference. Yes, obviously we do science to have a positive impact on society, but looking solely at metrics meant to measure that impact means ignoring the real world timespans of science. We live in an increasingly short-term thinking world where we seem intent on eating our seed corn. Remember that all the societal impact you’re seeing today is the result of the seemingly esoteric basic science that was done decades ago, and ask yourselves, what will we use to build societal impact twenty years from now?"