Diana Hicks

Professor

Member Of:
  • School of Public Policy
  • ADVANCE IAC
  • Technology Policy and Assessment Center
Office Location: Rich 219
Related Links:
Email Address: dhicks@gatech.edu

Overview

Dr. Diana Hicks is a Professor in the School of Public Policy, Georgia Institute of Technology specializing in metrics for science and technology policy. She was the first author on the Leiden Manifesto for research metrics published in Nature, which has been translated into 24 languages and won the 2016 Ziman award of the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) for collaborative promotion of public interaction with science and technology. Her work has informed policymakers in the U.S., Europe and Japan. She has advised the OECD, Flanders, the Czech Republic, and Sweden on national research evaluation systems. She chaired the School of Public Policy for 10 years and co-chaired the international Atlanta Conference on Science and Innovation Policy for 10 years and has been an editor of Research Evaluation. Prof. Hicks has also taught at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley; SPRU, University of Sussex, and worked at NISTEP in Tokyo. She earned her D.Phil and M.Sc. from SPRU, University of Sussex.  In 2018 she was elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) for “distinguished contributions to the evaluation of national and international research and development enterprises, and for outstanding leadership in science and technology policy education.”

Education:
  • D.Phil, SPRU, University of Sussex, Science and Technology Policy
  • M.Sc., SPRU, University of Sussex, in Science, Technology and Industrialization
  • B.A, Grinnell College, Physics

Interests

Research Fields:
  • Program Evaluation, Public Management and Administration
  • Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy
Geographic
Focuses:
  • Asia (East)
  • Europe
  • United States

Courses

  • PUBP-4010: Policy Task Force I
  • PUBP-4020: Policy Task Force II
  • PUBP-4410: Science,Tech& Pub Policy
  • PUBP-6001: Intro to Public Policy
  • PUBP-6401: Sci,Tech & Public Policy
  • PUBP-8530: Adv Science& Tech Policy

Publications

Selected Publications

Journal Articles

  • Trade literature provides a path from research to practice
    In: Research Evaluation [Peer Reviewed]
    Date: October 2024

    The work of professionals practicing in the community provides a pathway for knowledge advances to reach practice.  Yet outside of medicine, little attention has been paid to this phenomenon.  Similarly, professions are defined by bodies of knowledge yet studies of professions do not attend to the dynamic relationship between professionals and the ever advancing frontiers of knowledge.  In this paper, we delineate the pathway from research to practice as evidenced in trade literature.  Our analysis is based on bibliometric and survey data.  We find evidence that trade literature is informed by research in references to research papers found in trade periodicals, and trade press articles authored by researchers. Professionals feed back their advances in practice to the community by writing articles for trade publications, and sometimes these are articles are cited by scholarly journal articles, thus the exchange of knowledge is bi-directional to a certain extent. Our survey established that many professionals read trade literature because the contents are relevant to their practice. They trust, with caveats, the material they read but trust more in material with an obvious connection to public sector research. Professionals can often point to ways their practice has improved due to something they read in a trade periodical. Thus the trade literature has institutionalized a mechanism of indirect linkage between research and practice. Indexing trade periodicals could provide a valuable resource for those wishing to make visible the connection between research and practice.

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  • Seeing Impact: genres referencing journal articles
    In: Profesional de la información [Peer Reviewed]
    Date: 2023

    This paper examines the societal impact of research from the perspective of interconnected genres. Information reaches professionals outside academia through many different types of documents. Those documents often connect with scholarship by referencing academic work, mentioning professors, or publishing articles authored by scholars. Here patterns of referencing journal articles are compared across professional genres. Such citation counts make visible societal impacts to the extent that a field engages a genre, and different genres favor different fields. Biomedical sciences are most visible in patent citation counts. News and social media most often reference medicine. Policy documents make heavy use of social science. Ulrich's indexing of trade journals, magazines, and newspapers suggests social sciences engage heavily with the professions through trade press. However, caution is warranted when using citations to indicate societal impact. Engagement with scholarship occurs not only through referencing but also through authorship and mentions. Not all citations indicate substantive engagement, particularly in social media. Academic literature is but one of many types of sources referenced in professional genres. And scholarship engages with many genres beyond those currently indexed, most notably trade press. Nevertheless, understanding citation patterns across heterogeneous professional genres offers a promising frontier for information sciences to provide a foundation for the analysis of scholarship’s societal impact.

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All Publications

Journal Articles

Chapters

Conferences

Working Papers

Thesis / Dissertations

Other Publications