Frequently Asked Questions
General Questions
The Use of Research Evidence (URE) Methods Collection, currently housed on the Open Science Framework (OSF) and its companion site, The Use of Research Evidence: A Repository of Methods, is a resource available for the URE community to collaboratively share and develop research methods its members are using to understand and improve the use of evidence in policy and practice. A primary goal of the repository is to allow URE researchers to create and publish their research approaches in an open space so that others can access and potentially build off of them. Our goal is to develop the scholarly network of researchers in this diverse field and to provide tools to allow us to iteratively build off of each other’s work.
- OSF – the Open Science Framework – is a platform developed by the Center for Open Science (COS) that allows researchers to privately manage and publicly share their projects in an effort to “increase [the] openness, integrity, and quality of research” (https://www.cos.io/about/mission). Protocols, instruments, and other tools developed for inclusion in the URE Repository are housed within our OSF Collection.
Founded in 1936 by William T. Grant, the Foundation funds research “that increases understanding of programs, policies and practices that reduce inequality in youth outcomes, and how policymakers and practitioners acquire, interpret, and use research evidence.” The W.T. Grant Foundation is a generous supporter of the URE Methods Repository. Learn more about the Foundation’s goals here.
Getting Work Included In the Repository
We have developed a set of tutorials that take you through the process of creating, developing, and publishing your protocol, step-by-step. To get started, click here.
We strongly recommend that you begin in our structure template, not just to create consistency of format and information in the Repository, but because it is already pre-formatted for easy use with our importer. That said, you can fill out as little or as much information as you like, and change sections to fit your needs.
No. We accept and include work on a rolling basis, and work with researchers at their convenience to add their protocols.
None whatsoever. When our team assists with building a protocol for the Collection, we do our utmost to present it accurately and faithfully to the material we are given. We’ll work with you to make sure that the final project that gets included in the Collection meets exactly with your approval first. Soon (as of this writing), we’ll be making it easier for researchers to add projects to the Collection themselves.
Yes! The Repository is a great place for empirical research that is either published or in press. Please see more information about that on our home page.
Because research in URE is a complex undertaking that spans across many different aspects of social sciences, we seek to be inclusive of any research protocols that may be related. Sometimes, however, there may be work that is not related or appropriate to our stated goals. Learn more about this here.
All rights to work included in the Repository remain strictly with the author(s), whether you add your project to the Collection yourself or do so with the assistance of our research team. Learn more about copyright and licensing here.