Social Impact Database
A publicly searchable website and API that organises hundreds of academic research papers into a single dashboard, making the social impact of university research easy to explore.
| Client | Hong Kong University of Science and Technology |
|---|---|
| UN SDGs | 13 Climate Action 17 Partnerships For The Goals |
| Impact | Hong Kong |
| Technologies | PHP, MySQL, API |
01 Introduction
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology is a public research university on the Clear Water Bay Peninsula in the New Territories, Hong Kong. Founded in 1991, it was the territory's third institution to be granted university status.
Hong Kong's University Grants Committee (UGC) ran its most recent Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) in 2020 to assess the performance of UGC-funded universities. They asked us to build an impact case study database, similar in design to one created for HEFCE in 2014.
The purpose of the website was to showcase the scale, breadth, and range of impact coming out of UGC-funded research. It was designed to serve several main groups:
- Governments
- Funders
- Universities and research offices
- Corporations
- IGOs and non-profit organisations
- Researchers
The aim was to connect each user with the case study (or set of case studies) most relevant to their question - whether filtered by geography, academic discipline, or type of impact. From there, users read the full case study documents to find the detail they need.
02 The Project
The main task was to build a database to showcase the 342 public case studies gathered during the Hong Kong RAE 2020.
It needed to be a publicly accessible website with an accompanying API, offering users high-level functionality:
- Powerful search using logical operators (e.g. AND, OR), compound phrases, and wildcards
- Faceted browsing by different attributes, such as submitting institution, unit of assessment, and type of impact
- A consistent view of each case study (text and images), with links to external datasets where relevant (for example, linking cited references to their records in the Web of Science)
- An API supplying structured records in XML and JSON, based on the user's queries or chosen facets
- Clear documentation so UGC could launch, host, and maintain the website themselves
{
"code": 200,
"status": "success",
"message": "Case studies fetched successfully",
"data": {
"body": [
{
"uid": "uoa14_cityu_impact_case_study_001",
"title": "3D Speckle Vision from Academic Research to the Real-World",
"order": 119,
"impact_china": 1,
"impact_global": 1,
"unit_of_assessment": {
"unit_of_assessment": "UoA 14 - Mechanical engineering, production engineering (incl. manufacturing & industrial engineering), textile technology and aerospace engineering",
"uoa": 14,
"panel_name": "Engineering",
"uoa_name": "Mechanical engineering, production engineering (incl. manufacturing & industrial engineering), textile technology and aerospace engineering"
},
"institution": "City University of Hong Kong",
"topic_primary": {
"label": "Imaging & Diagnostics",
}
},
{...}
],
"total": 342
}
}The underlying data was the 342 case studies, supplied as HTML files following the same basic structure. Each came with a metadata file holding key details — title, submitting institution, unit of assessment (UoA), and geographic metadata linking it to Geonames entities — plus between one and five high-level topics and "Web of Science" journal categories. Each case study also listed its cited references along with their bibliographic data (journal, year of publication, DOI, and external links).
The RAE2020 database brings 342 impact case studies together in one searchable interface. Users can search by keyword or phrase and refine results using metadata filters - unit of assessment, university, impact sector and topic, research category, location, and funder - with options to adjust how many entries display and switch between list and grid views.
With filters applied, results update instantly to show only matching case studies - here narrowed by unit of assessment, research category, and impact topic. Active filters appear as removable tags, columns can be sorted, and each result links straight through to the full case study, with a "Clear filters" option to start again.
Each case study opens as a full, structured document, with a "Jump to section" menu for navigating between the summary, underpinning research, references, impact details, and corroborating sources. A sidebar surfaces key metadata - university, unit of assessment, impact sectors - and links to the original PDFs, while tagged impact topics connect related case studies.
03 Conclusion
The UGC RAE 2020 database was delivered on time, on budget, and was well received by the university.
We built it with widely used, open-source tools and languages, but had to compromise on some features because of the high security constraints set by the university's IT department. The biggest challenge was configuring the application to run on their internally hosted server without having direct access to it. We worked closely with the team in Hong Kong to solve this, holding regular meetings despite the time difference.