Table 1 Selected Updated References
A | There is a large literature within medicine on quality of life measurement. For example, the Centers for Disease Control in the United States measure "health-related quality of life" in terms of healthy vs. unhealthy days, as reported on health surveys. "Unhealthy days are an estimate of the overall number of days during the previous 30 days when the respondent felt that either his or her physical or mental health was not good." (http://www.cdc.gov/hrqol/methods.htm, accessed January 1, 2010). CDC reports that "in recent years, several organizations have found these Healthy Days measures useful at the national level for (1) identifying health disparities, (2) tracking population trends, and (3) building broad coalitions around a measure of population health compatible with the World Health Organization's definition of health." (http://www.cdc.gov/hrqol/methods.htm, accessed January 1, 2010). In this article, I use the term quality of life goal in a broader sense, to indicate a family of public goals articulated for research. The health-related quality of life measure are one example of indicators that could be used to implement planning and evaluation for such goals. For example, they could be used at the aggregate assessment level described in a later section of the paper. |
|---|---|
B | It would be interesting to compare the U.S. case with other national examples, such as the quite distinctive institutional developments in the United Kingdom. See Shergold, M and J Grant, Freedom and need: The evolution of public strategy for biomedical and health research in England, Health Research Policy and Systems 2008, 6(1):2-12. |
C | There is of course a substantial literature on the ways knowledge is co-produced with its social context. It is beyond the scope of this article to review that literature, but interested readers may wish to refer first to Nowotny, H, P Scott, and M Gibbons, Re-Thinking Science: Knowledge and the Public in an Age of Uncertainty. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003. |
D | This dimension corresponds to knowledge utilization, which again has its own signficiant literature. As a starting point into this literature, the reader may wish to consult the work of Carol Weiss, for example her 1980 article "Knowledge creep and decision accretion," in Knowledge: Creation , Diffusion, Utilization 1: 381-404. |
E | Science communication has its own large literature and a central journal, Public Understanding of Science http://pus.sagepub.com. The emphasis on teaching as a form of science communication taken in this article as it was first written calls attention to systemic structural aspects of the science communication system that get little attention in the science communication literature. |
F | In the U.K., a whole new health research strategy was introduced in 2006, including institutional mechanisms designed to increase translational research and move research knowledge from "bench to bedside." For the strategy, see http://www.dh.gov.uk/en/Publicationsandstatistics/Publications/PublicationsPolicyAndGuidance/DH_4127127, accessed January 1, 2010. For a description of the work of one of the new institutions, see http://www.nihr.ac.uk/about/Pages/default.aspx, accessed January 1, 2010. |
G | In the United States, the Washington Research Evaluation Network (WREN) played such a role; its efforts have been folded into an interagency group developing the Science of Science Policy (http://scienceofsciencepolicy.net, accessed January 1, 2010). There is an active branch of this community in the U.K. and the Netherlands, and the Swedish Research Council has helped to move the state of the art forward with two workshops (http://www.vr.se/forskningvistodjer/seminariedokumentation/medicin/workshopnewfrontiersinevaluationofimpactsofmedicalresearch.4.72e6b52e1211cd0bba880005128.html, accessed January 1, 2010). |