Provocations

Everybody can claim that a practice or policy is evidence-based. But when is it justified to do so?

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Christian Gade

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘When is it justified to claim that a practice or policy is evidence-based? Reflections on evidence and preferences’.

When you search the internet, you will find a myriad of claims about different practices or policies being evidence-based. To avoid ‘evidence-based’ becoming merely a buzzword that everyone can throw around and use whenever they deem it suitable, it is important to consider the conditions for when it is justified for you as an individual or organisation to claim that your practice or policy is evidence-based.

My argument is that this is the case if, and only if, three conditions are met – an argument that suggests that it depends on subjective preferences whether you are justified in claiming that your practice or policy is evidence-based, and that it is important to give more attention to the normative dimension of the field of evidence-based practice and policy.

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Evidence & Policy Call for Papers – Special Issue on Learning through Comparison

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Special Issue Editors: Katherine Smith, Valerie Pattyn and Niklas Andersen

Evidence & Policy is pleased to invite abstracts for papers that explicitly employ comparative analysis and/or that develop insights about evidence use in policy through comparison. Authors of selected abstracts will be invited to submit a full paper for consideration for inclusion in a special issue that is aiming to demonstrate the conceptual and empirical contribution that comparative research can offer scholarship on evidence and policy.

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What can we learn from local government research systems?

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Andrew Booth, Emma Hock and Alison Scope

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Examining research systems and models for local government: a systematic review’.

Local government has been unfairly characterised as a black hole when it comes to getting evidence into practice. While it is true that work remains to be done to cultivate interest in research across local government, our recent review found plenty of evidence of academia, local officials and other partners collaborating to make a difference around the generation and use of locally-meaningful research.  

What seems to be less common, however, are coordinated approaches to organising research activity within and across an entire local government system. What can we learn from diverse approaches that harness mechanisms across different local government systems?

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What knowledge informs policy decisions? And how can we measure it?

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Jonas Videbæk Jørgensen

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Knowledge Utilisation Analysis: measuring the utilisation of knowledge sources in policy decisions.’

Using research-based knowledge to inform policy decisions constitutes a key ambition in most modern democracies. As such, enhancing the utilisation and impact of research has gained widespread attention among scholars and policymakers, with a range of initiatives to promote it. But how often is research-based knowledge used in policy decisions? And what kinds of knowledge have the strongest impact? Despite years of scholarship on the topic, measuring knowledge utilisation remains a significant challenge. In a new Evidence & Policy article, I discuss existing measures of knowledge utilisation and present a new approach called ‘Knowledge Utilisation Analysis’ (KUA).

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Are there gendered trends in research authorship at Evidence & Policy?

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William L. Allen, Associate Editor

Gender differences in academic publications: why it matters

Across fields, there are concerns about the extent to which gender disparities exist in academic journal publications. Several studies of professional social science—including in economics, political science, and sociology—indicate women remain underrepresented in the pages of top journals. Inequalities in this regard may be particularly consequential because peer-reviewed publications remain one of the most important factors that contribute to success in applications for academic jobs, promotions, and grants.

While there are several reasons for this pattern, including authors’ perceptions of where their kinds of work are more likely to be favorably received, the simple fact of its presence has been enough motivation for some journal editorial teams to explicitly measure and report on the gender breakdown of both submissions and published work where possible.

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Portable peer review at Evidence & Policy

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Zachary Neal, Editor-in-Chief

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.

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What does it mean to use research well?

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Joanne Gleeson, Lucas Walsh, Mark Rickinson, Blake Cutler and Genevieve Hall

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Quality use of research evidence: practitioner perspectives’.

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).

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When should scientists rock the boat? Advising government in a pandemic

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Paul Atkinson

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘How did UK policymaking in the COVID-19 response use science? Evidence from scientific advisers’.

Should scientists who want to influence government ‘speak truth to power’, or follow the ‘rules of the game’? Do you make more difference as an outsider or an insider? This matters to any scientist who wants their research findings to have impact. As a former Department of Health civil servant employed in a University public health department, I often work with my Liverpool and Oxford colleagues on achieving ‘policy impact’, and this question arises each time, but it has never mattered more than in the Covid-19 pandemic. So what is the best way to influence government?

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Considerations for conducting consensus in partnered research

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Kelsey Wuerstl, Miranda A. Cary, Katrina Plamondon, Davina Banner-Lukaris, Nelly Oelke, Kathryn M. Sibley, Kristy Baxter, Mathew Vis-Dunbar, Alison M. Hoens, Ursula Wick, Stefan Bigsby and Heather Gainforth

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Building consensus in research partnerships: a scoping review of consensus methods’.

When reading articles describing a collaborative research decision, such as a research partnership creating a list of research priorities, we often read the statement, ‘The research partnership came to consensus’. But what does this statement actually mean – what is consensus, what does it mean to come to consensus, and how did the research partnership come to consensus?

Research partnerships are characterised by researchers and research users engaged in a collaborative research project to enhance the relevance and usefulness of research findings. Consensus methods require group members to develop and agree to support a solution that is in the group’s best interest. However, simply doing partnered research and using consensus methods does not guarantee the research addresses the priorities of those most affected, nor that inclusion and power dynamics have been considered. Consensus methods are often poorly reported and missing crucial information about how the research partnership made decisions about the project, as well as how issues of inclusion, equity and power dynamics were navigated.

We conducted a scoping review to better understand how research partnerships use consensus methods in health research and how these research partnerships navigate inclusion and power dynamics. Our findings, published in Evidence & Policy, identified six recommendations to enhance the quality of research teams’ consensus methods.

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How do contextual factors influence the development of e-cigarette recommendations?

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Marissa J. Smith, Srinivasa Vittal Katikireddi, Kathryn Skivington and Shona Hilton

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Contextual influences on the role of evidence in e-cigarette recommendations: a multi-method analysis of international and national jurisdictions’.

The use of evidence in public health decision-making is not as straightforward as it may seem – people have different ideas of what constitutes ‘evidence’, and how it should be interpreted and used in different contexts. Even when there is agreement on what constitutes evidence, research has shown that the same evidence, used in different contexts can lead to different policy decisions. A current example of this is e-cigarette policies and their recommendations. Our Evidence and Policy article explores how context, broadly defined as the factors that influence decision-making, influences the role of evidence in developing recommendations and how it may contribute to different policy approaches.

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