The Use of Research Evidence

If you would like to:

• Share details about the methods used that your published research may not have included, and that you wish to share, including details such as the interview protocol, the coding system used to analyze interview responses, and the full survey; 
• Share your work, but also make sure you and your colleagues get credit for your intellectual contributions; 
• Clarify for those not intimately involved how this work was important for a number of your projects as well as several projects done by other researchers; 
• Identify research efforts that both influenced the development of these methods, and also research in which these methods have been used. 

On OSF, you can develop a protocol for the URE Methods Collection that includes any and all of the details mentioned above.

Steps: 

1. Create an OSF account, and then create an OSF project.
2. Add any contributors to your project you wish to include.
3. Populate your Wiki or use any of the available templates to detail important aspects of method or reference in your research. You can also link to research efforts that influenced the development of the method and efforts in which this method has been used.
4. Attach and link any supporting documents that you wish to include.
5. Establish a Creative Commons license that specifies the conditions of use and acknowledgement for others interested in applying your methods.
6. Define any license and license-holders for the full project.
7. Define any license and license-holders for specific instruments and/or other research components.
8. Add your protocol to the URE Collection.

If you would like to begin to share the work you are doing, but have not yet published the work or the work is in process of being published, you can still contribute to the URE Methods Collection.

Here’s how:

1. Create an OSF account, and then create an OSF project.
2. Clearly mark the publication status of the work in the title and description so that others are aware that the work is not yet published.
3. Add any contributors to your project you wish to include.
4. Populate your Wiki or use any of the available templates to detail important aspects of method or reference in your research. You can also link to research efforts that influenced the development of the method and efforts in which this method has been used.
5. Attach and link any supporting documents that you wish to include.
6. Establish a Creative Commons license that specifies the conditions of use and acknowledgement for others interested in applying your methods.
7. Define any license and license-holders for the full project.
8. Define any license and license-holders for specific instruments and/or other research components.
9. Add your protocol to URE Collection.
10. Update information about publication status as appropriate.

If you would like to:

• Discover URE research methods that have already been used in education; 
• Learn about the methods that have been used to explore URE questions of interest in other fields; 
• Find methods you can potentially build upon to carry out your own research 
• Perform a review of methods used in URE 

You can use the URE Methods Collection in a number of ways:

• Explore methods, other problems and areas in URE (health policy, criminal justice, etc.), and identify key scholars in the field
• Read about methods in more detail and examine actual protocol documents used in published research (surveys, interviews, observations, coding systems, etc.)
• Learn how different URE researchers have studied particular problems within the field;
• Learn how others have innovated upon existing methods;
• Build on other’s methods by copying existing instruments and protocols and/or adapting or “forking” said instruments and protocols in your own research (while attributing to the original work).