Research summaries

Research by opioid manufacturers distorted authorship and overstated findings

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Brian Gac, Hanna D. Yakubi and Dorie E. Apollonio

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Issues arising from the study design, conduct, and promotion of clinical trials funded by opioid manufacturers: a review of internal pharmaceutical industry documents’.

From 1999 to 2021, opioid overdoses caused over one million deaths in the US. The pharmaceutical industry has been held legally responsible in some cases for overstating the benefits and understating the risks of opioid use, leading to overprescribing that contributed to these deaths. Opioid manufacturers sponsor clinical trials to generate scientific evidence that supports use of their products to gain regulatory approval, and to use in commercial materials to promote drug sales. Previous research has found industry sponsored research may use dubious research practices to generate findings that justify use. Three examples of such research practices include inappropriate use of enriched enrollment trial design, ghost authorship, and overstatement of research findings.

In our recently published Evidence and Policy article, we identified research practices used in clinical trials funded by opioid manufacturers that created the perception that opioids were safe, non-addictive and effective in treating pain. Since 2005, confidential documents made public in litigation against pharmaceutical companies have been collected in the Opioid Industry Document Archive (OIDA) at the University of California San Francisco for storage in perpetuity. In January 2020, OIDA made available the first 503 documents that later become part of the larger OIDA, totaling over 62,000 pages, that were released as part of the Oklahoma litigation in a discrete collection named the Oklahoma Opioid Litigation Documents. These documents included clinical trial reports, witness declarations, internal corporate communications and marketing strategies regarding opioids, and served as the primary data source for the study.

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Local organisations and researchers can play a key role as intermediaries in municipal policymaking for improving community health

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Renee Parks and Fanice Thomas

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Municipal officials’ perspectives on policymaking for addressing obesity and health equity’.

More than 30% of adults in the US have obesity, with higher rates among those who have lower incomes or are racially or ethnically minoritised. Local-level policymakers within municipal governments can play a unique role in addressing obesity and related health disparities through policy strategies, including zoning and other land use laws, city or park master plans, and local, healthy food procurement policies that create healthy environments and promote community members’ engagement in health promoting behaviours.

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.

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The long game: understanding and maximising researchers’ policy engagement activities across career levels

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Alice Windle and Joanne Arciuli

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Research-policy engagement activities and research impact: nursing and health science researcher perspectives’.

There are many ways in which researchers try to influence policy using the evidence that they produce. Studies have examined such research-policy engagement activities in public health, but little is known about what nursing and health sciences researchers do to promote the impact of their research in terms of policy. Our Evidence and Policy article explores nursing and health sciences researchers’ experiences of activities to promote their research and influence policy, across different career stages. It also explored researchers’ perspectives on barriers and enablers to maximising policy engagement.

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Knowledge brokers in local policy spaces: early career researchers and dynamic ideas

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Sarah Weakley and David Waite

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Academic knowledge brokering in local policy spaces: negotiating and implementing dynamic idea types’.

It is now commonplace for many academics within higher education institutions to simultaneously take on the roles of both knowledge producers and knowledge brokers in policy spaces as part of their everyday working. In these roles at the intersection of the evidence and policy nexus, they undertake traditional research activities but also engage with policy actors using their research ideas and expertise to change conversations and develop solutions to policy problems. In our new article in Evidence and Policy, ‘Academic knowledge brokering in local policy spaces: negotiating and implementing dynamic idea types’, we reflect on how ideas move within local policy spaces and the hands that move them. We considered this issue in the context our own work with local bodies in two different policy arenas – one looking at social recovery after Covid-19 and one focussed on socioeconomic change.

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Understanding organisations that provide evidence for policy

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Eleanor MacKillop and James Downe

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Knowledge brokering organisations: a new way of governing evidence’.

New organisations have emerged in different countries to help inform policymaking. Different from think tanks and academic research centres, these Knowledge Brokering Organisations (KBOs) attempt to influence policy by mobilising evidence. Our research examines how their origins and roles are rooted in politics, and explores their need to build credibility and legitimacy in their policy community. Despite examining KBOs on different continents – the Africa Centre for Evidence, the Mowat Centre in Canada and the Wales Centre for Public Policy – we show how they have become a tool mobilised in similar ways by their respective governments.

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Entrepreneurship research makes a difference to policy, despite appearances to the contrary

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Steve Johnson

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘The policy impact of entrepreneurship research: challenging received wisdom’.

Conventional wisdom across the entrepreneurship research community is that policymakers take little notice of our research findings, preferring to follow the ideological inclinations and electoral ambitions of politicians and to take most notice of those who shout loudest. Policies are therefore not always evidence-based and as a result may not achieve their stated objectives.

This argument has some validity. There are many examples of research that questions the rationale for and impact of existing policies or makes policy recommendations that are subsequently rejected or ignored by policymakers. My recently published article in Evidence and Policy explores entrepreneurship research and policy in the UK over 30 years and finds that, despite appearances to the contrary, there are however grounds for optimism among those of us who believe that research can, does and should have some impact on policy.

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Increasing the reach of science using tailored and targeted messages

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Taylor Scott and Jessica Pugel

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Cutting through the noise during crisis by enhancing the relevance of research to policymakers’.

We know that policymakers are most likely to use research evidence when the evidence fits what they need at that time, and that email is a cost-effective way of sharing such research. But researchers aren’t the only ones in legislators’ inboxes – constituents and special interest groups also seek out legislators’ attention and their inboxes. Thus, we need to understand how to better reach legislators with science so that we can cut through the noise and provide trustworthy research evidence at the right time. This is especially true during moments of crisis, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, when our study occurred, ‘Cutting through the noise during crisis by enhancing the relevance of research to policymakers’.

Although the literature theorises that policymakers use research they deem as timely and personally relevant, there has been a lack of practical strategies for improving perceived relevance. Through four experimental trials with US legislators across four issue areas (COVID-19, violence, exploitation and policing), we found support for one such strategy: including the legislators’ name or state/district name in the subject line. In three of the four trials, tailored emails were engaged with more often.

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Framing the evidence on sugar taxes in Germany: lessons for public health

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Katharina Selda Moerschel, Peter von Philipsborn, Elizabeth McGill and Benjamin Hawkins

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Evidence-related framing in the German debate on sugar taxation: a qualitative framing analysis and international comparison’.

Although sugar taxation is considered an important evidence-based intervention in the fight against obesity, some countries, such as Germany, have not yet implemented such a tax. While evidence does matter in policy processes, it does not speak for itself; it must be interpreted and used in specific contexts. What this context looks like, i.e. the framing of the underlying problem and the policy objectives, depends on the goals of the policy actor. To better understand how stakeholders in Germany argue for and against sugar taxation and how they utilised evidence, we examined how evidence was framed in 114 newspaper articles and compared our findings with similar studies from Mexico, the US and the UK.

German stakeholders demonstrated similar patterns of evidence use and evidence claims to those found in Mexico, the US and the UK. Tax supporters framed obesity as being (at least partly) attributable to sugar consumption and identified a reduction in sugar consumption as a key policy objective. They cited Mexico and the UK as main examples of successful reduction in sugar intake and framed sugar taxation as an effective means to tackle obesity in combination with other interventions.

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Employer involvement in post-Brexit migration policymaking: the case of UK horticulture

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Sam Frederick Scott

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘The entanglement of employers and political elites in migration policymaking: the case of Brexit and the revival of UK horticulture’s guestworker scheme’.

The UK has faced considerable labour shortages following the Brexit vote and the Covid-19 pandemic. Horticulture is one sector that has been particularly vulnerable, with fears of crops being left to rot in the fields commonly aired. In a new Evidence and Policy research article I look at the public pressure employers put on government, and indeed were invited to put on government, as post-Brexit migration policy emerged. I conclude that, in the case of horticulture, migration policy was made through the intimate entanglement of employers and political elites and that employers got what they wanted: a new seasonal guest worker visa scheme. This new scheme is unprecedented in its scale (up to 40,000 workers) and as broad as possible in scope (potentially global). However, despite this, concerns still remain over continued harvest labour shortages in 2022 and beyond.

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Applications of the Use of Research Evidence (URE) Methods Repository

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Drew Gitomer, Kevin Crouse, Nikki Dreste and Meged Eisenberg

We recently announced in the William T. Grant Foundation Digest the launch of the Use of Research Evidence (URE) Methods Repository, a new, open resource in development that focuses on the use of research evidence. The Repository is housed in a Collection on the Open Science Framework (OSF), and we welcome contributions in which detailed research methods are catalogued in an open-access format. One of our principal goals in designing this resource is to serve and connect the broad community of stakeholders that engage with and around topics focusing on the Use of Research Evidence (URE). Accordingly, we have designed the Repository so that it can be used in multiple ways that are tailored to the different interests and goals that different potential users have.  

As we were designing the Repository, we envisioned an open-access resource for the broad community of URE participants. This includes providing a space for the URE research community to share and display a fuller description of their methodological approaches than typically appear in final publications and making those approaches accessible to those who are interested in discovering or reviewing research methods that are used in URE studies. We saw value in ensuring that practitioners, funders, and others outside of academic research could access all of the resources without needing a paid subscription or institutional account. We also want to engage researchers and graduate students in the social sciences who have not done research in URE but are interested in learning more about the questions and spaces they address.

In this blog post, we describe the most common intended use applications of the URE Methods Repository.

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