Evidence & Policy is piloting a new portable peer review policy aimed at reducing inefficiencies in the publication process, and lessening some of the burdens placed on reviewers and authors by the cycle of repeated submissions to different journals. The official policy is available in the journal’s Author Instructions, but this blog post provides some additional background details and rationale for adopting this policy.
In our Evidence and Policy article, we discuss municipal officials’ decision-making regarding policies impacting community health, their views on the prevalence of obesity and health disparities in their communities, and their role in addressing them. By understanding policymakers’ views on obesity and health disparities, we can identify best practices for sharing evidence with policymakers and promoting its integration into policies that address health disparities in communities.
The use of research to inform practice can play a vital role in improving decision-making and social outcomes. As such, research use has gained widespread attention, with a range of initiatives now in place across sectors, countries and jurisdictions that promote it. Yet, what it takes for research to be used on the ground, let alone what quality research use looks like, is not well understood (Sheldrick et al., 2022). Without these understandings, there are real risks that research into research use will stay, as Tseng (2022) suggests, on ‘the proverbial shelf (or website) — far from the action of policy deliberations and decision-making’. This presents a challenge to the research community; to not only gain robust evidence on how research is used by practitioners, but also what it means to use research well and what it takes for it to improve.
In our new article in Evidence and Policy, we address this challenge by presenting findings from an investigation into Australian educators’ views on using research well in practice. Utilising thematic analysis, we draw on survey and interview data from almost 500 Australian educators (i.e., school leaders, teachers and support staff) to examine their perspectives in relation to a previously developed conceptual Quality Use of Research Evidence (QURE) Framework (Rickinson et al., 2020, 2022).