Giving Compass' Take:

• Brookings takes a close look at how politicians cite certain research when it comes to promoting policy, but often don't do enough due diligence. This article includes ways to be more responsible.

• What can we all learn from the advice given here, whether in the policymaking world or outside of it? Start by being thorough with data and proceeding with caution.

• Here are some more prudent ways to translate research into evidence-based solutions.


Today’s finance-research complex closely links funding to “impact”, which includes evidence of policymakers and politicians citing the research in question. What research politicians choose to highlight therefore influences what is eventually funded. Yet, recent speeches and op-eds suggest that even key personnel in technocratic institutions that fund the generation of knowledge can end up citing material that deserves no place in a serious discussion.

Irresponsible citations follow primarily from the difficulty of keeping up with rapidly evolving fields and insufficient translational work. In that spirit, here are some suggestions based on current debates in the field.

1. Wait until peer review and publication: Please do not cite research that has not yet been peer reviewed and published. Publishing is not a guarantee of quality, but speechwriters can — and should — check if the journal is predatory or, alternatively, stick to reputed journals that have been around for a while.

2. Beware of small samples: The smaller the sample, the more likely that statistically significant results will be qualitatively large when the “true” effect is zero.

3. Cite the failures: Conversely, most large-N research will not produce big numbers; a lot of research will discover that things we thought should work really do not. Politicians seldom cite research documenting the failures of programs and therefore the millions of dollars in bad funding that were saved.

4. Beware of the silver bullet. Nothing excites us more than a silver bullet. Unfortunately, they seldom exist and it takes a while after the first intervention before the shine of that elusive metal wears off. So, yes, there are programs with a lot of promise, but that initial promise should prompt ecstatic calls for further research rather than outright endorsement.

Read the full article about better ways to cite research for policy by Jishnu Das at Brookings.