Dr. Ismael Rafols

Ismael Rafols is a senior researcher at CWTS and UNESCO Chair on Diversity and Inclusion in Global Science. He works on science policy developing novel approaches that help in fostering epistemic pluralism, broadening participation, and widening the distribution of the benefits from science. He is interested in funding portfolios and priority setting for societal challenges such as bird flu or obesity, and issues related to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly in health and agriculture.

Ismael has  been involved in policy initiatives ‘responsible metrics’, such as the implementation of UNESCO’s Open Science Recommendations, the Leiden Manifesto, the EC Expert Group on Open Science Indicators, on or discussions on biases against research topics from the Global South in assessment and databases. Previously, he had developed indicators and mapping methods for the evaluation of interdisciplinary research, e.g. in emergent fields such as bio and nanotechnology.

He received an MSc in Science and Technology Policy from SPRU (Sussex), a BSc in Physics from the Univ. Barcelona, a PhD in biophysics from Tohoku University (Sendai, Japan) and was a postdoc in nanobiotechnology at Cornell University. Before CWTS, he worked at SPRU (Sussex) (2005-12) and Ingenio (CSIC-UPV) (2012-19). In between academic positions, he has worked on international cooperation in Oxfam and the City Council of Barcelona.

Full list of publications available in GoogleScholar and ORCID.

Publications

Journal publications (2)

• Ciarli, T., & Rafols, I. (2019). The relation between research priorities and societal demands: The case of rice. Research Policy, 48(4), 949-967. (paper)
• Robinson-García, N., Van Leeuwen, T.N., & Rafols, I. (2018). Using altmetrics for contextualised mapping of societal impact: From hits to networks. Science and Public Policy, 45(6), 815-826. (paper)

Book chapters (1)

• Rafols, I., & Stirling, A. (2021). Designing indicators for opening up evaluation: insights from research assessment. : Edward Elgar Publishing. In P. Dahler-Larsen (Ed.), A Research Agenda for Evaluation (pp. 165-193). (paper)