Quality of Research - reflections, impact, and transdisciplinary interests... not a traditional recipe for HiCi!

About 15 years ago my head of department advised me to focus on one area and develop that so I could get a track record and become a successful research academic. I was all over the place (on paper).

Perhaps it was my dyslexia, and my love of how things worked and my dismay with so much clearly avoidable health inequity, and how on earth we could develop public health programs to improve health and equity. ?Well, I won several government contracts and grants (not glamorous or prestigious) but generated really useful outputs that other governments and researchers found useful and beneficial. I concentrated on musculoskeletal health, and health education, and questionnaires, and disease burden... lots of things, and began to win National Health and Medical Research (NHMRC) grants and fellowships.

I was totally stoked to be recognised in 2018 Clarivate highly cited ‘cross field’ researcher?that is, recognised as being in the top 1% in my field(s) for my research in the last decade… across multiple fields. As Prof Billie Giles Corti recently wrote in a LinkedIn post, and inspired me to write this note (thanks Billie!), we can have impact through interdisciplinary research. I have changed my research focus again, integrating a transdisciplinary approach, to develop a wonderful research program and fabulous team focusing on #HealthLiteracy at Swinburne University of Technology.?

Health Literacy was a non-field 10 years ago and I really am thrilled, for my team and myself, to be named in the 2021 Clarivate highly cited list, this time in the Social Sciences. Writing great papers is, at least for me, a huge team effort. Our Centre for Global Health and Equity at the School of Health Sciences has concentrated on health equity, useful tools, and building scalable processes. Researchers all around the world have found them useful and use them – to generate health and equity.

On reflection, a useful learning for me as a researcher is to focus on important and useful public health topics. As a team, we have published a relatively modest number of papers for our field, often with very small grants. They are frequently about how we built useful tools for researchers, governments, NGOs, and even the World Health Organization (WHO) and how they were applied. It is wonderful that many other researchers now use these tools - to make a real difference in people’s lives, where ever they are.