If you ask someone who the intended audience for their paper is they will often say ‘managers’.
Its often said that managers don’t read papers, but that’s not quite try. Its more helpful to think about a hierarchy of ways our published research can impact management. This will help you tailor the message, and communications outputs to different audiences.
Three tiers of audience to think about for your paper to reach managers: (1) managers and their (non-scientific) advisors; (2) scientific advisors of managers; (3) scientists working on this topic.
I’m going to use my recent study on timelines for ecosystem recovery as an example. The intended audience was primarily researchers, but the findings also have implications for management.
In brief, found that recovery times for coastal habitats are often longer and more variable than might be expected. This means when you try to restore a coastal habitat, it might not happen right away. However, appropriate management interventions can significantly accelerate the recovery process.
Management roles are as diverse as scientific disciplines, so its better to think about the type of manager you’d like to influence, rather than just ‘managers’ as a homogenous category.
Then think about what decisions the managers are making. The decisions managers make are varied. Conservation research is often about informing where or how managers act. But the there are many smaller decisions that are made along the way.
For instance, we looked at what types of restoration actions (planting seagrass vs stabilising sediments to improve seagrass recruitment) are best under what circumstances. The type of restoration is a relatively big decision that maybe can be made once and not easily changed.
There are many other smaller decisions. For example, our estimations of recovery times could influence how communication about conservation is made. It is important to set expectations about recovery and not to over-promise.
Likewise, managers are often making decisions about how to allocate budgets and resources. So for our research, an implication could be how managers allocate resources to improving restoration actions versus identifying the drivers of ecosystem loss.
Managers are unlikely to read your paper directly (with some exceptions I’ll detail below). So if managers are the audience for your research, you’ll need to do some additional communication. This could be via media releases, or better yet, presenting to managers at management forums, or collaborating directly with them.
In my experience many conservation managers are reading papers, and in fact, study science or even used to be scientists. These people may make the time to read your paper if its direclty relevant them and it helps to email it to them as well.
For examples, decisions makers in non-governmental organisations often have a scientific background. The types of decisions they might be making are how to allocate project budgets among monitoring, implementation and community engagement and what types of activities to chase funding for.
It helps if you are already collaborating with your target audience, so that you can better understand their needs.
Scientific advisors to managers can also be varied. For exmample, they might be academics who collaborate with managers or government scientists.
This target audience is more likely to read your paper and understand more of the technical details. In our study on recovery times we suggested the new models we developed could be applied to any coastal habitat restoration to provide estimates of recovery times.
So the decisions this group of people might be making include: what should we focus on in our research and what methods should we use? Think about how you can influence those decisions.
Of course they need to know about your paper first. So the usual things of emailing people, doing social media and presenting at conferences are important.
The audience of scientists advising managers is the one most able to be able to implement the technics we described and directly use the research. In my case, that would mean using the R code we provided that implements the methods we described.
Communication to this audience is best via direct contact or presenting and meeting people at conferences. You are more likely to meet these types of people if you target discipline and region specific conferences where your research has greatest direct relevance. At big international conferences the audience will be more interested in the general conclusions.
The final audience is scientists working to advance research in your area of interest.
This is the traditional audience for research papers. Things this group does (and there may be overlap) will hopefully influence upwards to levels 2 and 3.
So by raising the bar on your research topic you may still ultimately be contributing to management. It’s just going to take longer and the specific impact of your paper on management will be harder to trace.
You can tailor your communciations about the paper appropriately. For instance, international conferences are a good opportunity to meet researchers and talk about the general implications of your research for the field.
All three types of audience are legitimiate audiences for your research. It helps to think about the audience in advance so you can tailor your paper and communications in advance. In particular, it will affect how you write your abstract (do you mention management implications or not) and where you put your effort for communications and engagement.
So when you say ‘I want my paper to impact management’ think about who these people are and what decisions they are making. You don’t have to reach managers directly to have an impact on management.
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