post by Bill Gardner
There is a great conversation underway about how we can bring more scientific information into public policy discussion. Austin Frakt clarifies the problem.
How much gets through? Not much. Julie Suleski and Motomu Ibaraki found that less than 0.04% of journal articles in health are reported on by the media.
Austin and I agree that researchers need to do better at translating their research into the policy world. They need to master the skills of good policy writing ( != dumbing it down), they need to relate research to the specific decisions that policy makers have to make, and they need to publish in channels that reach policy makers.
Kristen Rosengren joined the conversation with a great post. She writes as if we disagree, but I think that is not the case.
Gardner's diagram [to the right] also identifies how translation occurs through multiple media, depending on the presenter and the intended audience, and recognizes that communications are often bi-directional from researcher to intermediary and back again. He laments:
"For better or worse, health researchers’ careers are driven by journals with 5% acceptance rates and NIH institutes with 5% funding rates. These facts concentrate your mind on the value of your time.”
Yet his initial proposal*—essentially a call for more publication outlets—fails to address how other types of translation ( i.e., the more high-touch approaches of implementation science and knowledge transfer) affect policymaker understanding and application of evidence. And, perhaps more importantly, how little value is placed on investing the researcher’s time in these types of translation activities.
That was not a lament. I like these competitions and the concentration of mind they demand. As Max Weber observed, this is the interior life of a scientist, and
whoever lacks the capacity to put on blinders, so to speak, and to come up to the idea that the fate of his soul depends upon whether or not he makes the correct conjecture at this passage of this manuscript may as well stay away from science. He will never have what one may call the 'personal experience' of science. Without this strange intoxication, ridiculed by every outsider... you have no calling for science and you should do something else.
Having said that, the intensity of scientific competition is a reality that must be faced. Spending time writing a blog, flying to Washington, reading policy briefs, debating on G+, and tracking the health policy twitter stream is time not spent writing for Science. Think Darwin. Whatever we may want scientists to do, intensive selection processes are reproducing a culture of specialists who single-mindedly devote themselves to sub-disciplinary problems. Like Rosengren, I do lament "how little value is placed on investing the researcher’s time in... translation activities," but lamentation changes nothing.
So what do we do? One thing would help is more journals that bridged the academy / policy gap. There are LOTS of journals. But there are few that edit for policy relevance and a broad audience while striving for a non-partisan, evidence-based approach. The paradigm cases are Foreign Affairs and Health Affairs, which may tell us that we need editors like Susan Dentzer or Fareed Zakaria with experience in journalism. I think these journals help in two ways. On the one hand, they give researchers a target journal to write for. They provide us with models of prose that has been cleaned of academic clutter. On the other hand, they provide journalists and policy makers with a filter, a table of contents and a twitter feed that is worth scanning.
Having said that, I am totally for "the more high-touch approaches of implementation science." The revolution in social media is making it easier for a health quant on the Canadian coastline to converse with a journalist in Washington or a foundation president in Palo Alto. Perhaps Academy Health could accelerate the formation of networks that cross strata and timezones through sponsorship of events that brought together researchers, journalists, and policy makers. By all means, let's brainstorm on how we can do that.
Perhaps the biggest challenge is to produce evidence that is sufficiently compelling to overcome existing biases about the direction health policy should take and what weight should be given to different types of evidence (e.g. anecdotal versus research,large studies versus better controlled studies, etc). In some cases, demonstrating that there is a consensus, or near consensus among researchers might carry more weight than trying to argue directly from the data itself.
Posted by: George | 10/10/2011 at 11:58 PM
George, that's an interesting observation. We do not have an easy method to demonstrate consensus among researchers. How would you propose to do it?
Posted by: Bill Gardner | 10/11/2011 at 04:05 PM