Research Seminar – Marion Poetz

Associate Professor of Innovation Management at the Department of Strategy and Innovation at Copenhagen Business School (CBS)

Non-scientist stakeholder involvement and research impact: causal evidence from patient and public participation in medical research

Marion Poetz, co-authored with Paul-Emmanuel Anckaert, Egor Burda, Christoph Grimpe, Paul Hünermund and Rossella Salandra

Opening the scientific research process to non-scientist stakeholders, such as patients or the public at large, has been argued to enhance both scientific and societal outcomes. At the same time, concerns remain about whether such involvement may compromise scientific rigour or generate trade-offs between scientific and societal impact.

We examine these competing perspectives in the context of medical research, focusing on Patient and Public Involvement (PPI). Using a sample of 20,137 articles published between 2009 and 2019 in the ten leading general medicine journals, we investigate whether PPI is causally linked to scientific and societal impact.

We exploit the British Medical Journal’s 2014 policy mandating PPI reporting as an exogenous source of variation in PPI and estimate causal effects using a two-stage least squares approach.

Our results show that PPI increases scientific impact, measured as scholarly citations, and enhances scientific novelty. Its effects on societal impact are differential across impact channels: while PPI increases citations in clinical practice guidelines, it is associated with fewer citations in policy documents.

These findings suggest that involving non-scientist stakeholders in medical research can enhance scientific rigour, while its relationship with broader policy influence and practice-oriented impact is more nuanced.