The desire for solutions that work is driving greater use of RCTs as proof of the impact of behavioral interventions. In an RCT, one group of individuals (called the treatment group) receives an intervention, and the other (the control group) does not. People are randomly assigned into one of the two groups, and ideally, neither participants nor researchers know who is in which group.

By comparing two identical groups chosen at random, we can control for a whole range of factors that enable us to understand what is working and what is not. This is why many people consider RCTs to be the gold standard of evidence. The awarding of the 2019 Nobel Prize for Economics to Michael Kremer, Abhijit Banerjee, and Esther Duflo for their experimental work alleviating poverty has brought even greater attention to RCTs.

A number of open repositories have emerged to make it faster to find solutions backed up by RCTs. These evidence clearinghouses produce what are known as “systematic reviews” of primary studies. A systematic review is a review that attempts to collect all empirical evidence according to defined criteria. Systematic reviews “sit above” RCTs with regard to confidence in findings, as they consolidate multiple RCTs.

Those criteria are intended to reduce bias, systematize and organize the evidence, and provide reliable findings on which to base decisions. There are now tens of thousands of systematic reviews, and using what the evidence-based policy expert Peter Bragge calls this “chronically underused asset” as your entry point can take much less time than scouring the eighty million individual research studies published since 1665!

Read the full article about public policy research by Beth Simone Noveck at Stanford Social Innovation Review.