the socioeconomic impact of health research in iranian universities of medical sciences: experiences from islamic republic of iran

Background & objective: socioeconomic impact evaluation is a systematic and data based analysis; it aims to determine the socioeconomic benefit of science in human life and health, organizational capabilities, decision making and so on. in this study, we intended to present the results of socioeconomic impact assessment in iranian universities of medical sciences (iums). materials & methods: based on scival database, socioeconomic impact indicators consist of two categories: citing – patent count (c-p), patent-cited scholarly output (p-cs), patent-citations count (p-c) and patent-citations per scholarly output (p-c/s) for economic impact, and mass media (mm), media exposure (me) and field-weighted mass media (f-wmm) for societal impact. mentioned indicators were extracted for all of iums during 2015-2018. preparation, extraction, weighting, scoring and ranking were the main performed steps in this study. results: almost 64% of iums had research activities, reflected their socioeconomic impacts. the c-p was 242 in all iums. the number of p-cs and p-c was 165 and 255, respectively. also, the average of p-c/s was 1.93 (max=6.4, min=0.5). related to societal impact, only 1% of published articles had been presented in media by iums (mass exposure). the average of f-wmm was 0.03. conclusion: socioeconomic impact evaluation is very complex; it involves a large scale of direct and indirect activities. therefore, evaluation with a limited number of indicators cannot provide a comprehensive view of impact. quantity and quality of universities' research activities are likely matters in socioeconomic impact.