Research use and publishing diversity: The role of organisation research publishing for policy and practice

Abstract

Digital technologies have enhanced the capacity for organisations across many sectors to produce, publish, and disseminate research in a variety of formats, and a great deal of it is sought and used in public policy and practice-related research, yet this diversity is often overlooked in studies of research use. While the need for diverse research sources and formats for public policy and practice is increasingly acknowledged, there have been few studies which articulate and categorise what this diversity looks like in practice, and how research is filtered and selected based on genre, source, and other facets. This article reports on a large-scale online survey and semi-structured interviews with research users across multiple sectors in Australia on the materials they access and use for policy and practice work. The results indicate that research users are active information seekers who require online access to diverse genres and formats produced by a range of sources and sectors. However, respondents also faced many barriers to research use, including the cost of subscriptions for academic journals, discoverability of reports and data, poor management of publications by organisations including government, and the time required for filtering and evaluation. Based on these findings I argue that policy research requires a far greater variety of genres and sources than is generally recognised with implications for the way research use and the research publishing system is understood and managed in Australia.

Points for practitioners

• Policy research and implementation requires diverse online sources and resources from multiple sectors, including reports, discussion papers, evaluations, and data, produced by organisations (grey literature), as well as journals and books.
• However, this paper finds there are major barriers to discovery, filtering, and access to diverse research publications for practitioners, resulting in poor productivity and policy outcomes.
• To improve the use of evidence for policy and practice, we must invest in efficient discovery, access, and management systems for diverse research publications.