30 March 2026
Most impact tracking tools focus on citations within academic journals. Coherent Impact takes a different approach — revealing how research is used across policy, practice, and applied settings, by tracking citations in the literature being produced by policy and practice organizations: government reports, NGO publications, think tank papers, IGO documents, and more.
Feedback from our development partners — including Liverpool, Griffith, Syracuse, Oxford, and Virginia Tech universities — confirmed that institutions currently identify policy and practice citations through fragmented, largely manual processes: monitoring specific organisations, reviewing reference lists in known policy reports, collecting examples directly from researchers. These approaches surface useful examples but rarely provide a comprehensive picture.
Coherent Impact has been made possible by five years of building Policy Commons and Applied Science Commons, which together now index over 40 million real-world documents from more than 33,000 organisations worldwide — no other service can draw on this scale of real-world content. Coherent Impact mines that content to show where and how academic research is actually landing outside the academy.
As one development partner observed: a Mayo Clinic article might mention a paper in passing, while the same research could be the basis of a whole OECD report. Understanding that difference is exactly what Coherent Impact is designed to reveal.
The platform is designed to support:
- Research offices documenting real-world policy and practice uptake, and building REF-style impact case studies
- Libraries complementing traditional citation databases with real-world evidence
- Researchers wanting to see where their work informs decisions beyond academia
- Think tanks and NGOs demonstrating to funders that their recommendations are reaching the right audiences