Research Utilization

This Impact Report identifies and summarises the diverse impacts, resulting from the £500m of UK funding of Science and Technology in 2013, using numerous quantitative metrics and short case study extracts.  It shows how the varied impacts of a national science and technology organization and its many funded programmes can be annually identified, captured, tracked, and summarised in a public document.

The report was produced for, and by, the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) -  the UK Research Council responsible for funding: (1) all UK astronomy, particle and nuclear physics research, (2) related UK science and technology facilities (e.g. as Harwell and Daresbury), (3) the UK contribution to international science (e.g. CERN, international telescopes and space missions), (4) innovation and business spin-off programmes, and (5) UK public engagement activities.

The Report was co-researched and co-authored by the STFC Impact Team, including myself while Impact Evaluation Manager in 2013, with Dr. Claire Dougan-McCallie (lead author/Head of Impact) and Jenny Beard, with additional input from senior managers, and many data and case study contributions from other key managers across STFC.

Varied key impacts are identified and reported including:

• Research amongst the best (by citation impact) in astronomy, nuclear and particle physics.
• Supported research of 226 Principal Investigators in 70 universities, led to 1,100 peer-reviewed papers in 2012.
• Facilities (the Diamond Light Source, ISIS and CLF) were used in 2012/13 by over 4,200 unique users , in over 2,400 experiments, producing over 1,000 papers in peer-reviewed journals.

• Technology from CERN benefited the UK economy by over £100 billion every year.
• Funding the development of the UK’s space, internet and computer animation industries, returned over £500 billion to the UK economy per annum.
• Funded Innovation Campuses hosted over 230 enterprises and supported over 5,000 jobs.
• UK industry won £43 million in contracts from the international subscriptions funded, and had accumulated a total of £150 million since 2005.

• Funded research inspired future generations to study STEM subjects, attracting 90% of UK undergraduates to study physics, funded 782 PhD students  and 16,800 student training days.
• Between 2009 to 2012 public engagement programmes engaged people on 58 million occasions, with 2 million people engaged in face-to-face activities in 2013 alone.

Science communication as an interdisciplinary field of study has always
been concerned with issues of knowledge utilisation. This theoretical paper focusses on the “knowledge” part of knowledge utilisation and provides a conceptual frame to distinguish between different types of knowledge in science-based practice. A practitioner’s knowledge store is portrayed as a dense set of personal knowledge, consisting of procedural knowledge, factual knowledge, potential factual knowledge and opinions/beliefs; the totality of which is continuously refined through more experiences and additional information received from people, documents or events. Implications for future studies of knowledge utilisation in science-based practices are highlighted and a number of questions posed to science communication as a profession.

Connecting research and policy persists as one of higher education’s most pressing challenges. Yet, the extent to which states rely on research evidence to craft policy remains under-studied. This chapter examines research utilization and public policy theory for their conceptual implications on how researchers might examine the role of information in the higher education policymaking process. The review of literature includes education-related studies, but also reviews classic studies drawn from political science, policy analysis, and evaluation. The inventory of how five theories of the policy process incorporate the research utilization literature identifies possible conceptual extensions of these frameworks and holds promise for increasing our understanding of how research influences policy. This chapter also discuss the influence of two types of intermediary organizations—state higher education agencies and regional compacts—on research utilization in the higher education policymaking process.

This research was funded by, and implemented within, a UK national research organisation, while the author was the KE and Impact Evaluation Manager responsible for assessing impact on a £15m UK government-funded research programme.

This work was also submitted as the authors MBA dissertation which was accepted and awarded in 2009.

ABSTRACT: A methodology and methods ‘toolbox’ is proposed for conducting impact research and assessment from within research programmes. The emphasis is upon how to clarify and assess the wider impacts from the early stages onwards.

The approach explicitly acknowledges, and attempts to address, the known issues and challenges of impact assessment while drawing upon the resources and opportunities available to research managers and researchers within such programmes.

The study has two triangulating foundations. Firstly, it examines the academic literature to help identify and design the pilot methodology and methods. Secondly it trials these in a real programme to both test and improve them.

The study was conducted over one year within one leading UK research organisation, where two research programmes (and around 60 research projects of £15m total value) were being assessed for their impacts. The study draws upon actual impact management experience and reflection, prospective (ex ante) and retrospective (ex post) assessments, participatory contributions from leading researchers undergoing assessment, and consultation with external users. The findings of this study outline the pilot and its first iteration. Recommendations are made for improvement to the methodology and methods.

A subsequent follow-on bid to UK government incorporating the impacts identified from implementing this methodology, successfully led to a further £15m of government funding.

It is expected the pilot methodology and methods will be applicable to other organisations, conducting and funding such research programmes, required to research and assess the wider research impacts.

Although primary focus of implemetation trials was upon research in physical sciences, technology, high-tech engineering, computing/IT, and environment, the wider literature study, the methodology design and justification, the methods proposed and used, and the resulting general recommendations and lessons are expected to apply more broadly to many other research areas, where the impact is to be found more widely in the society, economy, government or public sector or within organizations, policies, professions or the public.

Interest in this work is expected from research programme managers, impact managers and assessors, management consultants advising in this area, and government funding managers, all seeking to embed a developing approach to understand, capture, and enhance wider impact.

Grid computing has emerged from category of distributed and parallel computing where the heterogeneous resources from different network are used simultaneously to solve a particular problem that need huge amount of resources. Potential of Grid computing depends on my issues such as security of resources, heterogeneity of resources, fault tolerance & resource discovery and job scheduling. Scheduling is one of the core steps to efficiently exploit the capabilities of heterogeneous distributed computing resources and is an NP-complete problem. To achieve the promising potential of grid computing, an effective and efficient job scheduling algorithm is proposed, which will optimized two important criteria to improve the performance of resources i.e. makespan time & resource utilization. With this, we have classified various tasks scheduling heuristic in grid on the basis of their characteristics.

This research project aims to develop media for local community’s development and problem solving in Nakhon Pathom with the information from Thai Research Fund’s (TRF) research database and integrate such informationand media in the Pomelo model. The methodology used in this project is participatory communication with 3 stages, including 1) the pre-development stage of the media, 2) the media development stage, and 3) the post-media development stage. The research population covered 3 groups of stakeholders: the academic team, the community team, and the student team. The samples of the academic team were chosen using a selective approach from the lecturers in the field of Communication Arts, Faculty of Management Science, Phranakhon Rajabhat University, consisted of 10 lecturers. For the community team, the researchers  applied  the  snowball  sampling  technique to identify the sample group, consisted of the Pomelo gardeners in the area of Rai Khing municipality and the knowledgeable people in the community. For the student team, a purposive method was used in the researcher’s classes for the third year students, consisted of 7 groups. The development of the media to communicate TRF’s research in Nakhon Pathom can be summarized that the media have been developed by the students in various  forms such as infographics, comic books, pop-up cards, posters, comment picture for Line and Instagram, radiospot,  TV  spot  and  online  video  clips.  The  evaluation of  the  media  quality  and  benefits  for  the  community suggests  that  the  users  are  satisfied  with  the  media because it can be used in the community. In the learning process of the Pomelo model, the students also improved their knowledge and skills and were satisfied.

Evidence-based practice depends on factors such as practitioners’ knowledge and perceptions of research and research utilization including access to relevant research reports. Little is known about these issues with regard to Psychiatry Nurses in Nigeria. The study examined psychiatry nurses’ knowledge base for research conduct, perceptions of research and perceived barriers to research utilization. Responses to a 41-item self-reporting structured questionnaire, administered to psychiatric nurses with current employment in the only Psychiatry hospital in Calabar provided the source of data, for this descriptive cross-sectional survey. A total population study of 84 psychiatry nurses with current employment in the only Federal psychiatry hospital in Cross River State, Nigeria was undertaken. Results show that 52 (87.0%) of the respondents had received formal instruction on research, 42 (70.0%) attended research workshop previously, 36 (60.0%) have conducted research of their own and only 9 (15.0%) have collaborated with others. Significant difference (p < 0.05) was found between the Psychiatric nursing service managers and non-managers with respect to conduct of previous research. Educational level has a significant effect on frequency of utilization, ability to cope with issues surrounding presentation and accessibility of research findings (p<0.05). Fifty eight percent 35 (58.0%) of the respondents held positive outlook towards research conduct and utilization, 20 (33.0%) reported utilizing research findings frequently in their practice. The barriers identified by most of the respondents are unavailability of research reports / articles, inaccessibility of research reports and that implication for practice is not usually made clear. The Federal Ministry of Health should take urgent steps to make research reports accessible to nurses employed in Psychiatry Hospitals while Psychiatric Nursing Services Managers and educators should plan and implement educational interventions aimed at empowering psychiatry nurses with relevant knowledge, appropriate disposition and skills in conducting research, collaborating with other researchers, locating and evaluating research reports. 

Keywords: research, research utilization, psychiatric nurses

This article examines the evolution of western policy towards the idea of pursuing negotiations with the Taliban, or ‘reconciliation’, in Afghanistan and the role that research and expert opinion played in that process. The official western position has evolved iteratively from initial rejection to near complete embrace of exploring the potential for talks. It is widely assumed that the deteriorating security situation was the sole determinant of this major policy reversal, persuading decisionmakers to rethink what had once been deemed unthinkable. Moreover, given the politicized and sensitive nature of the subject, we might expect the potential for outside opinion to influence decision-makers to be low. Nevertheless, this article demonstrates that it would be a mistake to underestimate the role that research and expert knowledge played—the story is more nuanced and complex. Research coalesced, sometimes prominently, with other key drivers to spur and shape policy change. Importantly, it often took experts to make sense of events on the ground, especially where the failure of the military approach was not recognized, understood or palatable to those in official circles. Research interacted with changing events, policy windows, the emergence of new personalities and the actions of various intermediaries to shape emerging positions. More broadly, the case of reconciliation in Afghanistan reveals the difficulties and challenges, but also the variety of opportunities and techniques, for achieving research influence in conflict-affected environments.

Der Begriff Wissenstransfer wird sowohl in der Scientific Community als auch in unterschiedlichen gesellschaftlichen Sphären außerhalb des Wissenschafts- und Forschungsbereiches verwendet. Dennoch gibt es keine einheitliche Definition, sodass verschiedene Gruppen innerhalb und auch außerhalb der Universitäten unterschiedliche Ansichten dazu haben, was genau unter Wissenstransfer zu verstehen ist. In den GSK-Wissenschaften scheint dieses Phänomen besonders ausgeprägt zu sein. So existieren auch andere Begrifflichkeiten die teilweise als Synonyme verwendet werden oder aber für bestimmte Teilaspekte stehen. Gängige Varianten inkludieren etwa Wissensvermittlung, (Wissens-) Dissemination oder Wissensmanagement. In der englischsprachigen Literatur finden sich neben der gängigen Variante knowledge transfer beispielsweise auch knowledge mobilization, knowledge dissemination oder research utilization.
Da Wissenstransfer ein umfangreiches Feld ist, gibt es ein großes Spektrum unterschiedlicher Komponenten und Subdisziplinen, die mit dem Thema assoziiert werden können. Trotz des wissenschaftlichen Interesses an der Thematik wurde bisher kaum Forschung durchgeführt, welche sich mit dem Verständnis des Wissenstransfer-Begriffs befasst. Um hier mehr Klarheit zu schaffen, wurde im Rahmen der österreichweiten WTZ-Studie eine qualitative Erhebung durchgeführt. Dabei befragten wir Wissenschaftler_innen unterschiedlicher Disziplinen, um zu klären, welche Teilaspekte und Themen mit dem Begriff Wissenstransfer verknüpft werden. Zudem explorierten wir, ob Unterschiede zwischen den GSK-Wissenschaften und anderen wissenschaftlichen Disziplinen festzustellen sind.

This replication-extension study (Earley & Galluzzo, 2015) examined the information seeking activities of British Columbia (BC) school trustees in an effort to understand the transmission of research. Trustees were asked to identify the sources they used for acquiring research and information in the process of decision making. The frequency of use, believed most useful, and characteristics of information sources were examined as well as the influence of demographic and school district variables. One hundred and forty school trustees participated in this study. The most frequently used sources of information were briefing materials from the secretary treasurer, briefing materials from the superintendent, and members of the local school board. The source of information believed most useful was briefing materials from the superintendent. There were no differences between genders on most items, although females were more likely to consult with the community than their male colleagues. Trustees in smaller districts were more likely to turn to materials from provincial organizations and the Ministry of Education website whereas trustees in larger districts tended to turn to local and provincial newspapers. Research reports from university researchers or think tanks were not primary sources of information for BC school trustees who generally sought information that was in close proximity from their school board and community.

Science communication as an interdisciplinary field of study has always been concerned with issues of knowledge utilisation. This theoretical paper focusses on the “knowledge” part of knowledge utilisation and provides a conceptual frame to distinguish between different types of knowledge in science-based practice. A practitioner’s knowledge store is portrayed as a dense set of personal knowledge, consisting of procedural knowledge, factual knowledge, potential factual knowledge and opinions/beliefs; the totality of which is continuously refined through more experiences and additional information received from people, documents or events. Implications for future studies of knowledge utilisation in science-based practices are highlighted and a number of questions posed to science communication as a profession.

The rise in the influence of and spending by educational philanthropists and foundations over the past two decades, especially in the area of market-based reforms, such as charter schools, vouchers, and merit pay, is evident across the United States. Largely due to philanthropic investments, relatively new educational intermediary organizations (IOs) have also been growing in size, scope, and influence. These new IOs have sought to implement market-based reforms in key urban school districts, frequently based on ideological stances and/or evidence of their efficacy. As yet, researchers have not conceptualized the unique position of foundations in the landscape of intermediary organizations, market-based reforms, and evidence production and utilization. Drawing from a 3-year (2011-2014) study of IOs, research utilization, and policymaking in the case of “incentivist” reforms, we find that foundations are uniquely situated in the reform landscape as a central actor, at the “hub” of in...

The importance of using research findings to inform policy and program decisions is well recognized, but the literature on measuring research utilization activities is scarce. As funding to support some areas of research wanes or remains stagnant, the need to document the value of investing in research by its' effect on improved programs and policies becomes increasingly necessary. We present the experience of Project SOAR, a six-year USAID-funded project focusing on HIV/AIDS-related implementation research, to demonstrate measurement of research utilization. We follow the project's research-utilization logic model, including inputs, activities, outputs, and outcomes. We present tools the project developed and examples from project studies and discuss what works, remaining challenges and how to overcome them, and lessons learned. We then make recommendations for incorporating research-utilization activities and measurement in implementation-research studies.

Ideas matter greatly to educating marginalized children. Ideas matter greatly to educating marginalized children. Ideas about why they should be educated, as well as ideas Ideas about why they should be educated, as well as ideas about how to educate them effectively. When these ideas about how to educate them effectively. When these ideas lead to changes in government policy and are coupled with lead to changes in government policy and are coupled with specific knowledge about how to implement them, they specific knowledge about how to implement them, they achieve the greatest impact. achieve the greatest impact. The practice of international development organizations is not always aligned with an effective theory of action for deploying ideas to unleash educational innovation at scale. As the rate of local education innovation accelerates, it becomes ever more urgent that development institutions – if they are to remain relevant – find effective ways to connect ideas about policy and effective practices. Over the last 65 years, the world has witnessed one of the most remarkable transformations in human history: the universalization of the right to education. This transformation was the result of a social innovation, the Universal Inclusive education is not only the result of advocacy, but of knowing and applying 'what works'.

In this article we discuss the characteristics of knowledge that lead to practical utility. We first review previous efforts at identifying the characteristics of useful knowledge. These contributions are grouped into three perspectives according to which representational mode they imply: propositional, narrative, or visual. We develop a framework for pragmatic validity that encompasses knowledge represented in all three modes. However, we also note an over-reliance on the propositional mode in academia, which contrasts with a ...

About 2 000 corresponding authors of articles in the Web of Science (who had a South African university address) selected from a list of 22 categories the perceived beneficiaries of their research. A beneficiary was defined as an entity that is either directly affected by the research results or that has a direct interest in the outcome of the research. The objective was to classify the corresponding authors into meaningful clusters based on similarities in their responses about the perceived beneficiaries, and to construct a profile for each cluster in terms of eight measures of basic research. Eleven beneficiary clusters were identified and appropriately labelled. Three of the clusters with a combined share of 42 per cent had an almost exclusive focus on the research and academic community. Respectively 33 per cent and 59 per cent of 'pure basic research' and 'oriented basic research' projects appeared in clusters that contained beneficiaries from outside the public research and academic communities.

We consider how a partnership between two universities in the South West of England and a unitary local authority was put to work to mutual benefit. We show how research might directly inform local policy by grounding research in a local authority's practical needs to address ethnicity and racism, maximising the impact of our research and responding to international developments in evidence–based policy. The study explored the potential of young people to act as expert informants in social policy decision–making by asking them to identify how they differed from one another, which differences impacted upon their schooling and comparing these differences with generic social categories such as ethnicity, gender, class, disability for example (Boyask et al., 2009b). One response to the findings of the project was a structured reflection upon the capacity of our local authority partner to enact policy initiatives informed by the young people (Boyask et al., forthcoming 2013). Our investigation suggested that while some national policies intended to provide for individual needs in recognition of diversity, in practice this was difficult. Most local policy decisions were made on the basis of the needs of social groups identified through centralised data gathering (such as school test scores and numbers of children accessing free school meals). We recognise tensions for local authority officers who must follow recent national policy directives that prioritise both social group and individual needs. And finally, we suggest that dialogic partnerships between researchers and policy officers can inform policy decision–making by taking account of contextual understandings of social categories on the one hand, and dislodging the power of nationally defined categories of difference on the other.

The National Minimum Dataset for Social Care (NMDS-SC) has provided detailed data since 2006 on the workforce for adults social care services in England. In 2012, the organisation responsible for the dataset, commissioned an evaluation into the impact of the dataset on researchers and policymakers.
This paper discusses how a novel wide-ranging bibliometric approach, complemented by interviews of key informants, demonstrated how the impact of the dataset was developing.

The International Journal of Education Policy and Leadership published its first article June 5, 2006 and has been releasing articles steadily since then. With more than 300,000 article downloads and 104 published articles across 13 volumes, IJEPL has established itself as an important contributor to open access research publishing in the field of education. Initially published as a collaborative partnership among faculty at Simon Fraser University and George Mason University, and ASCD (a global professional development organization and publisher for education professionals), the journal has faced (and overcome) a number of key challenges in its 13-year history.

An increased role for the federal government and philanthropic organizations in education over the last decade, along with a growing demand for evidence by public and private policymakers, has invigorated an already vibrant sector of intermediary organizations that seek to package and promote research on educational policies and programs for policymakers, typically around a specific policy agenda. Educational reforms that promise to incentivize school improvement—charter schools, vouchers, teacher compensation incentives, and student pay-for-performance, for example—are of particular interest to intermediary organizations. This chapter examines how national and local intermediary organizations function to shape evidence on the benefits and drawbacks of incentivist educational reforms through funding, production, and dissemination in New Orleans, Denver, and New York City and at the national level. We find evidence of national-local coalitions through which a variety of evidences—academic, journalistic, anecdotal, think tank, and advocacy oriented—are produced and disseminated. We are also witnessing the ways in which intermediary organizations, through their coalitions, are providing a political function to a host of policy actors and the public writ large.

Background: The use of research evidence in health policy-making is a popular line of inquiry for scholars of public health and policy studies, with qualitative methods constituting the dominant strategy in this area. Research on this subject has been criticized for, among other things, disproportionately focusing on high-income countries; overemphasizing 'barriers and facilitators' related to evidence use to the neglect of other, less descriptive concerns; relying on descriptive, rather than in-depth explanatory designs; and failing to draw on insights from political/policy studies theories and concepts. We aimed to comprehensively map the global, peer-reviewed qualitative literature on the use of research evidence in health policy-making and to provide a descriptive overview of the geographic, temporal, methodological, and theoretical characteristics of this body of literature. Methods: We conducted a systematic review following PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) guidelines. We searched nine electronic databases, hand-searched 11 health-and policy-related journals, and systematically scanned the reference lists of included studies and previous reviews. No language, date or geographic limitations were imposed. Results: The review identified 319 qualitative studies on a diverse array of topics related to the use of evidence in health policy-making, spanning 72 countries and published over a nearly 40 year period. A majority of these studies were conducted in high-income countries, but a growing proportion of the research output in this area is now coming from low-and middle-income countries, especially from sub-Saharan Africa. While over half of all studies did not use an identifiable theory or framework, and only one fifth of studies used a theory or conceptual framework drawn from policy studies or political science, we found some evidence that theory-driven and explanatory (eg, comparative case study) designs are becoming more common in this literature. Investigations of the barriers and facilitators related to evidence use constitute a large proportion but by no means a majority of the work in this area. Conclusion: This review provides a bird's eye mapping of the peer reviewed qualitative research on evidence-to-policy processes, and has identified key features of-and gaps within-this body of literature that will hopefully inform, and improve, research in this area moving forward.

Despite increasing knowledge of potential benefits of research utilization in improving quality of healthcare management decision (HMDs) outcomes and practice, the use of research evidence by healthcare authorities continues to be a global concern. We examined the organizational contextual predictors of research utilization in management decisions of healthcare authorities in Arua district local government. The observational cross-sectional survey design was used, involving 225 questionnaires and nine key informant interviews, and the extent of influence of organizational contests was determined by estimation of predicted probabilities, and the corresponding odds ratios and coefficients using the binary logistic regression model. The results reveal that research utilization was significantly influenced by organizational context, whose overall predicted probability was 0.001 (p<0.05), with access to library (p=0.023), performance monitoring (p=0.029), information sharing (p=0.014) and participation in formal meetings (p=0.016) being significant predictors with fairly high odds ratios. These findings highlight the combined importance of performance monitoring, sharing information (social capital), access to library and participation in formal meetings (formal interaction) as significant predictors of increased research utilization. Even-though, sharing information showed strongest positive influence, which implies that workplace measures that promote sharing of information were about four times more likely to increase research uptake.

Across a wide variety of fields, research has long been promoted as a useful tool in helping policy-makers devise and enact policy. In the United States, the recently enacted federal No Child Left Behind Act specifically requires the use of high-quality research in education policy-making. In this rush to emphasize research, policy-makers have over-looked a number of important considerations, including issues related to research methodologies and structures (qualitative versus quantitative, descriptive versus analytic, etc.), and ethical issues around the use, design, and funding of research studies. Policies justified by research funded, conducted and published by pro-market advocates who bypass traditionally accepted norms for completing and applying research is of particular concern. The present paper examines these three critical issues, as well as their impact on teacher education and teacher educators. Additionally, the larger role of pro-market advocacy organizations is examined, as well as the response, or lack thereof, by the education establishment. Teacher educators must actively and effectively engage in this debate if they wish to retain control of their profession and continue to promote policy based on ethically sound and methodologically appropriate research conducted in the public interest.

Externally-led security sector reform (SSR) in conflict-affected countries may require an array of different and timely interventions to restructure the whole security architecture of a state. Whilst the intent of these efforts is political, their nature is usually technical, operational and targeted at military, police, justice or intelligence actors, or relevant groups in the civilian policy sectors. Because of their urgency, there is seemingly little or no room for research to influence the implementation of these activities. Nevertheless, academic studies on SSR have flourished in recent years, and case studies, ‘lessons learned’ and recommendations for policy-makers now enrich this burgeoning literature.
This paper analyses one of the early cases of an externally-led SSR intervention, namely the United Kingdom (UK) assistance programme in conflict-affected Sierra Leone. It seeks to understand whether and how research and knowledge on topics relevant to SSR influenced the development and implementation of the UK's SSR assistance policy in this country. Building on the Sierra Leonean case study, it then examines some general issues and themes, which characterise the use of research in SSR policy in conflict-affected environments.

The International Journal of Education Policy and Leadership published its first article June 5, 2006 and has been releasing articles steadily since then. With more than 300,000 article downloads and 104 published articles across 13 volumes, IJEPL has established itself as an important contributor to open access research publishing in the field of education. Initially published as a collaborative partnership among faculty at Simon Fraser University and George Mason University, and ASCD (a global professional development organization and publisher for education professionals), the journal has faced (and overcome) a number of key challenges in its 13-year history.

The importance of using research findings to inform policy and program decisions is well recognized, but the literature on measuring research utilization activities is scarce. As funding to support some areas of research wanes or remains stagnant, the need to document the value of investing in research by its&#39; effect on improved programs and policies becomes increasingly necessary. We present the experience of Project SOAR, a six-year USAID-funded project focusing on HIV/AIDS-related implementation research, to demonstrate measurement of research utilization. We follow the project&#39;s research-utilization logic model, including inputs, activities, outputs, and outcomes. We present tools the project developed and examples from project studies and discuss what works, remaining challenges and how to overcome them, and lessons learned. We then make recommendations for incorporating research-utilization activities and measurement in implementation-research studies.

This study examined the current status of research utilization practice of professionals in the context of the Ethiopian Commercial Banks. A conceptual model adopted from the Model of Research utilization, (Hemsley-Brown, J.V. (2004) and the literature review that focuses on the organizational characteristics, external factors and research utilization practices was consumed to conduct this research. The qualitative approach was employed to collect and analyze data for the study. The data were collected through interviews with directors, research officers and managers as well as document mining including research outputs and publications. Purposive sampling was used to select a sample of fifteen professionals from three banks among eighteen banks. Multiple case study research design approach was applied and deductive analysis approach was used. The results of the data analysis showed that the banks are fairly organized and structured with their own policy frameworks and research infrastructure. However, there are inadequate research activities produced by the banks. Besides, the utilization of those few research reports in the managerial activates is very low. The findings also disclosed that the collaboration between the internal and external environments on research activities seemed overlooked. For this reason, the research activities were not extended in accordance with the dynamics of the business environment. Finally, the research findings indicate that the measure challengers that hinder the research utilization practice of professionals in the banking sector are; the gap between the research teams and the decision-makers, inadequate trained manpower and scarcity of funding resources. Therefore, suggestions and recommendations were proposed in accordance with the major findings.

The study identified barriers to research implementation experienced by nurses, midwives and health visitors in five trusts and one health authority in Yorkshire, UK. Funk et al. (Appl. Nurs. Res. 4(1) (1991a) 39, Appl. Nurs. Res. 4(2) (1999b) 90) developed the BARRIERS to research utilisation questionnaire over 10 years ago, but no replication, in size (n = 1989) and extent, of that study appeared to have occurred. The staff population (n = 4501) were sent the BARRIERS questionnaire. 44.6% (n = 2009) were returned. Findings suggested nurses need time to read and apply research; authority to change practice; critical appraisal skills, an understanding of statistics and support of managers and peers (particularly doctors) to achieve successful practice change.

Statebuilding has risen to the forefront of international donor policies toward the security and development of fragile states, with governments now investing millions in statebuilding research every year. However, no serious study has examined the ways in which research influences policy in fragile states. Based on in-depth interviews with officials and researchers, this article begins to shed light on the central dynamics pertaining to research use in such contexts by exploring in some detail the experience of British in-country policymakers in three countries – Afghanistan, Nepal and Sierra Leone. The picture that emerges is a mixed one, with evidence of extensive use of different forms of research combined with worrying practices and lingering deficiencies in some key areas.