Research and Resources
Scan of Promising Efforts to Broaden Faculty Reward Systems to Support Societally Impactful Research
November 11, 2024
Informing Institutional Change
In this scan, we provide an overview of promising attempts to reform and/or strengthen
promotion and tenure (P&T) systems to reward the societal impact of research. For this project,
societally-impactful research is defined broadly to encompass research, analysis, writing, and
related activities that advance knowledge with an explicit priority of addressing policy or
practice questions. This includes but is not limited to research conducted in partnership with
policymakers or communities, sometimes referred to as “engaged research.” We do not imply
that traditional forms of investigator-driven, disciplinary-focused research do not have a societal
impact. Rather, we assess that existing P&T criteria tend to focus on the scholarly impact of
research and are not sufficiently sensitive to recognizing the societally-impactful outputs,
outcomes, and applications of research and to valuing nontraditional forms of scholarship more
explicitly designed for societal impact.
Building on the prior work of the Transforming Evidence Funders Network (TEFN) coalition
including the October 2022 conference, this scan draws upon and analyzes insights from 13
universities and 10 organizations in the United States to illustrate diverse efforts to expand P&T
systems and employ other innovations and strategies to better recognize societally-impactful
research. These promising approaches and our recommendations to accelerate change fall
broadly into three domains: (a) supporting faculty in generating and disseminating societally impactful research; (b) motivating, reforming, and building capacity for internal and external university evaluation processes; and c) shaping the broader disciplinary and funding ecosystems
to prioritize and support societally-impactful research. We further note the distinction between
efforts that have catalyzed innovations and the kinds of sustained effort needed for
institutionalization of changes in incentive structures and support systems.
