Bridging the Gaps: Making Academic Research Accessible
Over the years, one constant piece of feedback from practitioners is that academic research is inaccessible to support evidence-based decision-making by practitioners. It is inaccessible for two reasons — academic publications are not written for a practitioner audience and much of it lives behind pay walls, making it impractical for most organizations to access.
In coordination with the WHO-Europe Risk Communication, Community Engagement, and Infodemic Management (RCCE-IM) Unit Technical Advisory Group’s’s Research Taskforce lead by Professor Audra Diers-Lawson from Kristiania University College, Norway – the ICRCA is hosting a database of practitioner-focused summaries of peer-reviewed research that highlights the study’s summary, location, and critical recommendations for practice.
The summaries are produced by a state-of-the-art RAG process that ‘teaches’ the AI how to read and summarize peer-reviewed research and then builds a straight-forward plain language approach to reporting the findings in around 700-800 words. We have created a searchable database of these summaries with full reference citation. As a starting point, we have focused on journal articles from 2022 onwards that are relevant to RCCE-IM.
You can help this database grow by providing reference lists of at least 25 peer-reviewed articles dating from 2022 onwards on topics of relevant interest to crisis and risk communication research to icrca@wearecrisiscomm.com (please only submit the APA-style references with DOIs in an email — no attachments).
We anticipate this database going live in late 2024/early 2025.