Background: Policy advocates play a key role linking the separate worlds of research and policymaking - often serving as research brokers who increase the use of research and promoting more informed decision making. Yet this group is often overlooked in studies of research utilisation. Methods: We undertook two surveys of state-level advocates in…

Background: Understanding how policymakers define research and differentiate it from other sources of data is critical for scientists to improve how they conduct and communicate research to policy audiences. Yet, few studies have explicitly asked policymakers -- particularly state legislators in the USA -- how they define research evidence.…

Purpose: The study aims to analyze research trends and hotspots in the field of food and nutrition literacy to inform evidence-based policymaking, and promote the health and well-being of the general population. Design/methodology/approach: The Scopus database was used to retrieve relevant research articles using specific keywords related to food…

Background: Understanding knowledge utilisation in policymaking is a core task for the social and political sciences. However, limitations and biases abound in commonplace approaches to measuring such use. Consequently, we have little systematic evidence of the extent to which knowledge sources are used in policy decisions. Aims and objectives:…

Current assessments of research impact have been criticized for capturing what can be easily counted not what actually counts. To empirically examine this issue, we approached measuring research impact from two directions, tracing forwards from research and backwards from policy, within a defined research-policy system (childhood obesity…

The use of research evidence is increasingly seen as critical to improving practice across many areas of public policy. At the same time, the role of relationships and relational work have become far more widely recognised in many fields of professional practice. This paper brings together these two developments by focusing on the relational…

This article discusses what we know about the underlying social and political conditions shaping research evidence use in education and how this applies to Research-Practice Partnerships (RPPs). It discusses types of use, political dynamics and processes, brokers and intermediaries, and racial dynamics and lenses. It also recommends strategies for…

The complexity of contemporary higher education policy making and the multitude of evidences and actors in policy networks mean that relationships between higher education researchers, policy makers and research evidence are not straightforward. In this article, we use a theoretical lens of time, Adams' Timescapes, to explore this relationship and…

This research focuses on how members of the UK Parliament engaged with evidence in relation to the policy decision leading to the Selective Schools Expansion Fund, a policy designed to enable the existing 163 English grammar schools to apply for additional funds to expand their intake. Although a small case study, the narrow focus provides a…

A broad range of methodologies is routinely employed to track and analyse use of research evidence in public policymaking. However, available methods and tools are mostly equipped to track 'evidence' but are less equipped to capture and represent 'use' of evidence. In particular, existing methods overlook policymakers' frequent use of evidence for…

This paper looks beyond the environmental and sustainability education (ESE) field for ideas on understanding the research-policy relationship. It examines two specific bodies of literature that have analysed the interplay of research and policy in different ways -- critical policy studies and evidence use studies. Bringing these two literatures…

Recognizing the need for scientific fidelity and balanced representation in the evidence that informs public policy, this study investigates technical and issue bias in 43 policy briefs and state handbooks that provided information about the use of Student Learning Objectives to evaluate teachers' performance. The author uses multiple qualitative…

The Evidence to Action project (2019-2021), led by MDRC and the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO) and supported by Arnold Ventures, initiated a body of work designed to disentangle the barriers that exist between research and state-level higher education policy and partnered with state higher education agencies to…

For stakeholders who would like to see more research as a basis for educational policy, it is important to understand the prevalence of research use and the sources of the studies used by policymakers, as well as the factors that hinder research use in educational policymaking. Through an analysis of regulatory documents and interviews with 34 key…

It is widely agreed that the availability of high quality evidence does not translate readily into influence over policy decisions. This insight has generated long-running debates about the most effective way to 'bridge the gap' between policy research and policymaking, and to increase policy research 'uptake'. The proposed remedies (for example,…