Assessing the health research’s social impact: a systematic review

In recent year, a growing attention is dedicated to the assessment of research’s social impact. While prior research has often dealt with results of research, the last decade has begun to generate knowledge on the assessment of health research’s social impact. However, this knowledge is scattered across different disciplines, research communities, and journals. Therefore, this paper analyzes the heterogeneous picture research has drawn within the past years with a focus on the health research’s social impact on different stakeholders through an interdisciplinary, systematic review. By consulting major research databases, we have analyzed 53 key journal articles bibliographically and thematically. We argued that the adoption of a multi-stakeholder could be an evolution of the existing methods used to assess impact of research. After presenting a model to assess the health research’s social impact with a multi stakeholder perspective, we suggest the implementation in the research process of three practice: a multi-stakeholder workshop on research agenda; a multi stakeholder supervisory board; a multi-stakeholder review process.