Introduction
In November 2019, the William T Grant Foundation in the US sponsored the initial phase of work to develop an international repository for research methods to study the use of research evidence (URE). This was followed by a full build-out of a repository for use by the URE community.
The Use of Research Evidence (URE) Repository of Methods is an open resource for the URE community to share and learn about research methods used to understand and improve the use of evidence in policy and practice. It strives to be a site of collaboration where researchers can share and build upon the work of others in the community
Repositories of this kind promote best practice amongst researchers, by improving access to published papers, pre-prints, data and analyses, analysis tools, and enabling pre-registration of studies. By sharing research protocols, researchers can keep abreast of the research field as well as ensure transparency. Sharing methodological protocols such as search strategies, interview schedules, or coding tools help to promote efficiencies and improve the quality of research done across the field.
Our Approach
As Nikki Dreste and Drew Gitomer, and Kevin Crouse, describe in their May 2023 blog post Improving the URE Methods Repository: A Call for Community Feedback, the URE Methods Repository has the potential to help build stronger, better science across the many disparate disciplines that examine research evidence use, such as education, nursing, social work, criminal justice, and medicine.
The goal is to develop a research commons in which members of the broader URE community can make use of the collective expertise embodied in protocols, resources, and each other. We also want to include more contributors who are not traditional academic researchers publishing in high-impact journals and make space for those coming from a range of methodological traditions and roles.
Outputs and findings
To support the next phase of the URE Methods Repository, in July 2024 William T Grant have funded Transforming Evidence to work in partnership with London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, King’s College London and Overton to undertake a programme of work to house, grow and sustain the URE Repository.
We will address four goals over the next two years:
- Improve the methods and measures used in studies on the use of research evidence to better youth outcomes, including underscoring multiple methods for assessing research use and the need to triangulate and move beyond reliance on self-report alone.
- Increase the transparency of methods used to study and describe research use (and hopefully the consistency of concepts and measures across studies).
- Legitimize use of research evidence as a worthy and rigorous of study.
- Link to or communicate lessons about what is being learned.
Please get in touch if you have experiences or thoughts to share about how the URE Repository could better support your work. We look forward to hearing from you info@transforming-evidence.org