NWB2023_Trade press as pathways to impact

In many technical areas, university research advances knowledge while professionals practice in the community, often not in daily contact with universities. To advance both the profession and scientific field, research needs to inform practice and practice needs to inform research. Advancing science and practice depends on the ability to effectively transfer credible knowledge between the research and practitioner communities, and examining their literatures can provide insight into this process.

We start by analysing referencing in trade journals and magazines, media that circulates widely in the professional community and are extensively read. In prior work (Dobre, Herbert, Hicks, 2022), we have demonstrated that over a third of trade journals contain articles with references and 38% of these references are to documents in peer-reviewed journals. As such, we can demonstrate that trade journals engage with and draw up scholarly knowledge. In this oral presentation, we present the findings from our survey of professionals where we explore the extent to which trade journals influence engineers, clinicians, architects and others in their professional activity. We investigate the extent to which professionals read, engage with, trust and are influenced by trade journals.

Through our research we have established that the trade press, even consumer magazines, does reference academic literature. The rich dataset that we have built revealed important information about research that reaches application in professional work. Through the survey work, we aim to demonstrate the extent to which knowledge transfer equates to societal impact.