<p>The purpose of this study was to examine the values Marriage and Family Therapy (MFT) clinicians and researchers hold regarding effective dissemination strategies. Professional role was measured using self-report. Using Carnine’s three gaps in dissemination as a foundation, a questionnaire was created to measure perspectives about dissemination strategies. It was hypothesized that clinicians would value accessibility and usability more highly, whereas researchers would value trustworthiness more highly. Clinicians were also hypothesized to perceive current dissemination strategies as less effective. Subjects were recruited for an online study through social media and online correspondence with MFT programs, yielding 38 subjects. An exploratory factor analysis found that the questionnaire scales did not measure the constructs as originally intended. New constructs were created using the results of the factor analysis. A General Linear Model was used to determine if participants’ ratings on these new scales differed based on professional role. No significant results were found, indicating that researchers and clinicians have similar attitudes about effective dissemination strategies. Qualitative questions were also coded in order to find common themes answering why dissemination is important, how dissemination strategies are currently being used, and what barriers are still present in the dissemination process. The implications for clinical work and research are explored. Limitations and future directions are also discussed.</p>

The purpose of this study was to identify and determine attributes of vehicles which will bridge the communication gap between researchers and policymakers at the California State Legislature. The key policy actors, defined as those individuals who have the most effect on creation and content of educational policy in the area of education at the California State Legislature, were seen as operating in an atmosphere ideological in nature due to the absence of research data within the policy debate structure, and the effects of political pragmatics. The entire population of the Legislature, including the education committees consultants, were surveyed in order to obtain quantitative data. Qualitative data was generated by the use of selected interviews by the researcher as well as an open-ended survey question. A synthesis of the two methods of data collected generated the findings and recommendations. The findings of the study were that educational research should be presented in a very concise format with clearly marked headings and focused arguments as the rationale underlying the format. The information should be disseminated early and often to both houses' offices of research and educational committee consultants. Delivery of information just prior to votes on the legislation would be most effective. Financial reform in the area of school funding as well as restructuring were seen as the two most important issues research should be focused on currently. Recommendations for future study would be collection of data from the Assembly and Senate offices of research in order to determine the format and delivery of educational research most useful to these entities. Based upon the results, the research community should be surveyed to ascertain the best means for researchers and other educational professionals to link up with end users of research at the policy level. The same effort to determine most useful format and delivery should be conducted for the press since we saw in the results of currently used information that newspapers were ranked quite highly by the Legislature.

Academic researchers in many disciplines are facing difficulties in disseminating their research outputs beyond the academic community. Particularly, Information Systems (IS) academic researchers have been struggling to make their research more relevant to practice. The diversity of IS research means that should be a wide audience within and beyond academia who could benefit from IS research outputs. This audience includes educators, practitioners, patients, etc. How IS relevant to practice is a central dilemma of IS research. Research relevance is classified according to dimensions such as interesting, implementable, current, accessible “Article style” by many IS scholars. These dimensions are important to be investigated as some academic papers are yet to be beneficial to an audience beyond academia. The Accessible dimension is the focus of this study where accessible means the academic papers should be readable and understood in terms of tone, style, structure, and semantics by the potential audience beyond the academic community. This study investigates the barriers that limit academic researchers in disseminating and communicating their research outputs beyond academia. This study aims to design a communication method to assist academic researchers in disseminating and communicating their research outputs beyond academia. This study consists of three phases, in the first phase a qualitative method is applied by interviewing academics in the Information System and Computing Department at Brunel University to gain a better understanding of how and why academics disseminate beyond academia. Based on communication theories a research framework is adapted to analyse and explain the interview data. In the second phase, short videos are recorded of 10 academics where each explains one of their papers. In the third phase, two different groups are interviewed to evaluate the 10 short videos in regards the Information Quality (IQ) dimensions (i.e. appropriate amount of information, format, and timeliness). By using the thematic analysis technique the academics highlighted three barriers that limit them to disseminate and communicate their research outputs beyond academia. The three barriers are the message (i.e. academic structure and language of research papers), channel (i.e. academic journal and conferences), and social system (i.e. lack of Incentives, lack of time, and lack of support). Moreover, academics emphasised the vital role of feedback loop in their communication with target audience beyond academia. The 10 short videos are designed to overcome two of these barriers (i.e. message and channels). Each short video is evaluated by its academic author on one hand and the potential audience/stakeholders of the short video from the other hand (e.g. practitioners). Thus, the academic authors of the video suggest some changes by adjusting the video structure and adding some examples for more explanations of their research papers. Also, authors concerned about format particularly the visual elements of the video which have to be completely matched with the title of the video. However, the opinions of potential audiences vary based on their information need. For example, some practitioners are concerned with the practical information, in other words, practitioners seek the applicable part of the information provided in the short video (i.e. how to apply something); and others watch the short video to increase their awareness of a particular topic. This study will assist academic researchers to focus on how to disseminate their research outputs to audience/stakeholders beyond academia using media tools (i.e. video). Also, it provides a novel method of disseminating and communicating their research outputs beyond the academic community. Moreover, this study helps to create an interaction platform that enables academic researchers to build a collaborative framework and a mutual understanding with the audience beyond academia.

Altmetrics is a new bibliometric subfield that uses data from online platforms and social and mainstream media to track attention to and impact of scholarly content. Qualitative research is needed to increase knowledge of altmetrics and of what they may indicate about scholarly publications’ impact and influence. Through analyzing the second-largest source of altmetric events, tweets to academic articles, this thesis extends our understanding of these metrics. Using content analysis and an adapted framework for categorizing acts by levels of engagement, I analyzed 1,200 tweets to four humanities articles, recording their engagement with the articles, sentiment, hashtag use, and @mentions. I also categorized 203 of the tweeting accounts. There is considerable inter-article variation among tweets to the four articles. Overall, however, the tweets evidence low engagement with the articles, the retweet percentage is high, and many of the tweets are traced to few accounts. Contradicting prior suggestions that tweets may be particularly suited to indicating public engagement with scholarly articles, a large proportion of the tweets appear to be from academics. Confirming findings of prior studies, the results indicate that academics use Twitter to filter scholarly literature. I conclude that a single altmetric score is too reductive and of negligible use without deeper qualitative analysis. Unlike some altmetrics indicators that may reveal impact, tweets to articles rather indicate attention, casting doubt on the claim that altmetrics as a whole measure impact. Despite these limitations, tweets to articles and altmetrics more broadly can provide meaningful information not conveyed by citations.

Nowadays, scholars are encouraged to use video for research dissemination. In most of the EU and national research projects, it is the hard requirement that the project results need to be disseminated to the public in multiple channels, e.g. video, webpage, etc. Thus the general aim of this master thesis research has arisen from this challenge faced by scholars, who normally have limited experience in the media production workflow and collaborating with video producers. To bridge the gap between researchers and media experts, better workflow guidance on production management is needed. In this study, the literature on three conventional video production management methods is reviewed and compared, aiming to identify the advantage and disadvantage of the methods for the research project video production. Emerging from the key findings, a novel management model is developed to meet the needs of researchers. Meanwhile, a logic workflow is proposed accordingly. The proposed approach is implemented and evaluated with a case study on a real video production project for a research centre at KTH. The limitation of the study is discussed in the end, with the suggestion given on further research. / Idag uppmanas forskare att använda video för forskningsförmedling. I de flesta EU-och nationella forskningsprojekt är det ett hårt krav att projektresultaten måste sprida sig till allmänheten via flera kanaler, t.ex. video, webbsida etc. Således har den generella målsättningen med detta examensarbete uppstått på grund av denna utmaning som forskare står inför, som normalt sett har begränsad erfarenhet av medieproduktionsarbete och av samarbete med videoproducenter. För att överbrygga klyftan mellan forskare och medieexperter behövs bättre arbetsflödesledning för produktionsledning. I denna studie granskas litteraturen för tre konventionella videoproduktionshanteringsmetoder och jämförs för att identifiera fördelar och nackdelar med metoderna för ett forskningsprojekts videoproduktion. En ny ledningsmodell har utvecklats för att möta forskarnas behov. Under tiden föreslås ett logiskt arbetsflöde. Det föreslagna tillvägagångssättet genomförs och utvärderas med en fallstudie gällande ett verkligt videoproduktionsprojekt för ett forskningscenter vid KTH. Begränsningen av studien diskuteras i slutet, med förslag på vidare forskning.

In recent years, the UK higher education sector has seen notable policy changes with regard to how research is funded, disseminated and evaluated. Important amongst these changes is the emphasis that policy makers have placed on disseminating peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles via Open Access (OA) publishing routes e.g. OA journals or OA repositories. Through the Open Science agenda there have also been a number of initiatives to promote the dissemination of other types of output that have not traditionally been made publicly available via the scholarly communication system, such as data, workflows and methodologies. The UK Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2014 introduced social/economic impact of research as an evaluation measure. This has been a significant policy shift away from academic impact being the sole measure of impact and has arguably raised the profile of public engagement activities (although it should be noted that public engagement is not equivalent to social/economic impact, but is an important pathway to realising such impact). This exploratory study sought to investigate the extent to which these recent policy changes are aligned with researchers publication, dissemination and public engagement practices across different disciplines. Furthermore, it sought to identify the perceptions and attitudes of researchers towards the concept of social/economic impact. The study adopted a mixed-methods approach consisting of a questionnaire- based survey and semi-structured interviews with researchers from a broad range of disciplines across the physical, health, engineering, social sciences, and arts and humanities across fifteen UK universities. The work of Becher (1987) and Becher & Trowler (2001) on disciplinary classification was used as an explanatory framework to understand disciplinary differences. The study found evidence of a lack of awareness of the principle of OA by some researchers across all disciplines; and that researchers, in the main, are not sharing their research data, therefore only the few who are doing so are realising the benefits that have been championed in research funders policies. Moreover, the study uncovered that due to the increased emphasis of impact in research evaluation, conflicting goals between researchers and academic leaders exist. The study found that researchers, particularly from Applied and Interdisciplinary (as opposed to Pure) disciplinary groups felt that research outputs such as articles published in practitioner journals were most appropriate in targeting and making research more accessible to practitioners, than prestigious peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles. The thesis argues that there is still more to learn about what impact means to researchers and how it might be measured. The thesis makes an overall contribution to knowledge on a general level by providing greater understanding of how researchers have responded to the impact agenda . On a more specific level, the thesis identifies the effect of the impact agenda on academic autonomy, and situates this in different disciplinary contexts. It identifies that it is not only researchers from Pure disciplines who feel disadvantaged by the impact agenda , but also those from Interdisciplinary and Applied groups who feel an encroachment on their academic autonomy, particularly in selecting channels to disseminate their research and in selecting the relevant audiences they wish to engage with. Implications of the study s findings on researchers, higher education institutions and research funders are highlighted and recommendations to researchers, academic leaders and research funders are given.