The circulation of knowledge beyond the academia: On scholarly couplers at porous borders

With strong pressure to make academic research socially and economically relevant, academics face the problem of reconciling inherently academic products through which they are assessed (e.g. scientific articles) with other products that are often demanded by non-academic social actors. These products, which we call scholarly couplers, make up an important part of academic work, often ignored or underestimated in evaluation instances. In this article, we show how these types of products articulate with traditional ones and argue that academic production should be observed (and evaluated) through heterogeneous product chains, fostering more diverse academic profiles.