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Global priorities for research and the relative importance of different research outcomes: an international Delphi survey of malaria research experts

BACKGROUND: As global research investment increases, attention inevitably turns to assessing and measuring the outcomes and impact from research programmes. Research can have many different outcomes such as producing advances in scientific knowledge, building research capacity and, ultimately, healt...

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Autores principales: Mulligan, Jo-Ann, Conteh, Lesong
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2016
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5139033/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27919257
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12936-016-1628-4
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author Mulligan, Jo-Ann
Conteh, Lesong
author_facet Mulligan, Jo-Ann
Conteh, Lesong
author_sort Mulligan, Jo-Ann
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: As global research investment increases, attention inevitably turns to assessing and measuring the outcomes and impact from research programmes. Research can have many different outcomes such as producing advances in scientific knowledge, building research capacity and, ultimately, health and broader societal benefits. The aim of this study was to test the use of a Delphi methodology as a way of gathering views from malaria research experts on research priorities and eliciting relative valuations of the different types of health research impact. METHODS: An international Delphi survey of 60 malaria research experts was used to understand views on research outcomes and priorities within malaria and across global health more widely. RESULTS: The study demonstrated the application of the Delphi technique to eliciting views on malaria specific research priorities, wider global health research priorities and the values assigned to different types of research impact. In terms of the most important past research successes, the development of new anti-malarial drugs and insecticide-treated bed nets were rated as the most important. When asked about research priorities for future funding, respondents ranked tackling emerging drug and insecticide resistance the highest. With respect to research impact, the panel valued research that focuses on health and health sector benefits and informing policy and product development. Contributions to scientific knowledge, although highly valued, came lower down the ranking, suggesting that efforts to move research discoveries to health products and services are valued more highly than pure advances in scientific knowledge. CONCLUSIONS: Although the Delphi technique has been used to elicit views on research questions in global health this was the first time it has been used to assess how a group of research experts value or rank different types of research impact. The results suggest it is feasible to inject the views of a key stakeholder group into the research prioritization process and the Delphi approach is a useful tool for eliciting views on the value or importance of research impact. Future work will explore other methods for assessing and valuing research impact and test the feasibility of developing a composite tool for measuring research outcomes weighted by the values of different stakeholders. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12936-016-1628-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
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spelling pubmed-51390332016-12-15 Global priorities for research and the relative importance of different research outcomes: an international Delphi survey of malaria research experts Mulligan, Jo-Ann Conteh, Lesong Malar J Research BACKGROUND: As global research investment increases, attention inevitably turns to assessing and measuring the outcomes and impact from research programmes. Research can have many different outcomes such as producing advances in scientific knowledge, building research capacity and, ultimately, health and broader societal benefits. The aim of this study was to test the use of a Delphi methodology as a way of gathering views from malaria research experts on research priorities and eliciting relative valuations of the different types of health research impact. METHODS: An international Delphi survey of 60 malaria research experts was used to understand views on research outcomes and priorities within malaria and across global health more widely. RESULTS: The study demonstrated the application of the Delphi technique to eliciting views on malaria specific research priorities, wider global health research priorities and the values assigned to different types of research impact. In terms of the most important past research successes, the development of new anti-malarial drugs and insecticide-treated bed nets were rated as the most important. When asked about research priorities for future funding, respondents ranked tackling emerging drug and insecticide resistance the highest. With respect to research impact, the panel valued research that focuses on health and health sector benefits and informing policy and product development. Contributions to scientific knowledge, although highly valued, came lower down the ranking, suggesting that efforts to move research discoveries to health products and services are valued more highly than pure advances in scientific knowledge. CONCLUSIONS: Although the Delphi technique has been used to elicit views on research questions in global health this was the first time it has been used to assess how a group of research experts value or rank different types of research impact. The results suggest it is feasible to inject the views of a key stakeholder group into the research prioritization process and the Delphi approach is a useful tool for eliciting views on the value or importance of research impact. Future work will explore other methods for assessing and valuing research impact and test the feasibility of developing a composite tool for measuring research outcomes weighted by the values of different stakeholders. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12936-016-1628-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. BioMed Central 2016-12-06 /pmc/articles/PMC5139033/ /pubmed/27919257 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12936-016-1628-4 Text en © The Author(s) 2016 Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
spellingShingle Research
Mulligan, Jo-Ann
Conteh, Lesong
Global priorities for research and the relative importance of different research outcomes: an international Delphi survey of malaria research experts
title Global priorities for research and the relative importance of different research outcomes: an international Delphi survey of malaria research experts
title_full Global priorities for research and the relative importance of different research outcomes: an international Delphi survey of malaria research experts
title_fullStr Global priorities for research and the relative importance of different research outcomes: an international Delphi survey of malaria research experts
title_full_unstemmed Global priorities for research and the relative importance of different research outcomes: an international Delphi survey of malaria research experts
title_short Global priorities for research and the relative importance of different research outcomes: an international Delphi survey of malaria research experts
title_sort global priorities for research and the relative importance of different research outcomes: an international delphi survey of malaria research experts
topic Research
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5139033/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27919257
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12936-016-1628-4
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