Our academic system is set up to perpetuate this disconnect. We are rewarded for writing scientific papers and obtaining research grants. The promotion and tenure process in academia is highly dependent on these traditional measures of productivity and success. Infrequently is the reach and impact of our science evaluated beyond the traditional metrics of scientific citation. To encourage researchers to move in a new direction, we will need to change the way we reward scientists to more fully value contributions to research dissemination in nontraditional – but potentially more impactful - ways. I share a comment by a colleague in response to a fellow education scholar’s tweet that “Sometime before morning, my blog hits 21 million page views”, to which he replied: “And researchers everywhere worry about their journal’s “impact factor””. His comment should give us reason to pause and rethink the way we disseminate research and how we ensure that our research is actually making a difference.
