Introduction
Transforming Evidence was born out of a recognition that all disciplines and sectors have an interest in how relevant research is made and used. We found that – with some exceptions – academic disciplines tend not to learn from or connect with each other about this shared area of work. This leads to people reinventing the wheel, and also a plethora of terms, tools, and methods. Our hope is that by connecting the communities who work in this area, we will begin to be able to ask new and important questions, such as ‘who gets to participate in knowledge production, and does it matter?’
Our Approach
One important first step is trying to identify who this community is. This is pretty challenging, but perhaps not surprisingly so given that we all use different terms to describe what we do. We made a start on this at our launch event in 2018 where we completed a 3 wave survey of key scholars and funders. Since then, we have been trialling bibliometric analysis of the field to map the scholarly communities within this space.
Please get in touch if you would like to learn more or have a great idea for analysing the data we are collecting!