Table 1 Inclusion and exclusion criteria

Inclusion criteria

 • English and Scandinavian language peer-reviewed and grey literature published between January 1970 and July 2017 reporting or summarising empirical findings on organisational factors of research use relevant for public policy-making.

 • We included studies focusing on organisational factors positively related to evidence-based or evidence-informed decision-making in public policy.

 • We included studies applying the diffusion of innovation theory by Rogers [35] if we identified the link between the ‘innovation’ and research use or evidence-based or evidence-informed decision-making from the title and abstract.

 • We included reviews of empirical findings and theories if the review method was clearly described.

Exclusion criteria

 • Books, book chapters, book reviews, editorials, opinion articles, debate/discussion articles and comments on articles.

 • We excluded papers on research use if they did not focus on public policy-making within the policy organisation, for instance, implementation of screening programmes in community clinics, unless we found the word ‘policy’ in the title or abstract, and if we were able to extract the factors of interest.

 • We excluded studies that did not include policy-makers as study population, e.g. surveys of researchers’ perception of barriers and facilitators on research use in policy-making.

 • Study protocols were excluded unless they included empirical results from pilot testing.

 • We excluded papers if they only reported organisational barriers of research use, unless we deemed that the authors clearly stated that, by reversing one or more of the barriers, the factors would become facilitators.

 • We excluded papers focusing on research use through networking activities between policy-makers and external stakeholders, such as researchers, unless we were able to identify factors within the policy organisation clearly presented in the results as one of the main drivers of research use such as research capacity, governmental coordination or policy-makers’ preferences.