Introducing Reach: find and track research being put into action
By: Dawn Duhaney
Tags: Data Science, Government, World Health Organization, Research And Development, Science Policy

At Wellcome Data Labs we’re releasing our first product, Reach. Our goal is to support funding organisations and researchers by making it easier to find and track scientific research being put into action by governments and global health organisations.

We focused on solving this problem in collaboration with our internal Insights and Analysis team for Wellcome and with partner organisations before deciding to release Reach more widely.

We found that evaluation teams wanted tools to help them measure the influence academic research was having on policy making institutions. We noticed that it is often challenging to track how scientific evidence makes its way into policy making. Institutions like the UK Government and the World Health Organisation have hundreds of thousands of policy documents available — it’s a heavily manual task to search through them to find evidence of our funded research.

At Wellcome we have some established methods for collecting evidence of policy influence from our funded research such as end of scheme reporting and via word of mouth. Through these methods we found great examples of how funded research was being put into policy and practice by government and global health organisations.

One example is from Kenya. The KEMRI Research Programme — a collaboration between the Kenyan Medical Research Institute, Wellcome and Oxford University launched a research programme to improve maternal health in 2005. Their research was cited in the World Health Organisation and with advocacy efforts from the KEMRI team influenced the development of new Kenyan national guidelines of paediatric care.

In Wellcome Data Labs we wanted to build a tool that would aid the discovery of evidence based policy making and be a step in the process of assessing research influence for evaluators, researchers and funding institutions.

Reach searches through hundreds of thousands of publicly available documents from the World Health Organisation, UK Government, UK Parliament, Medecins San Frontieres, NICE and UNICEF to find citations of scientific research publications. Users also have the ability to search through the corpus of policy documents from the global health organisations that we have collated.

In Wellcome Data Labs we have a commitment to openness, open data and transparency. Our GitHub repository is open and available to view. We get our database of published scientific research from European PubMed Central and we scrape policy documents only from openly available global health organisations and governments.

Building Reach has been a multidisciplinary effort from the team. Data scientists built the initial machine learning text parsing model and engineers built data pipelines that run the product. As Reach is based upon a machine learning model we’ve done a lot of work internally as a team on thinking about ethics and unintended consequences of releasing the product into the world. You can read more about our algorithmic fairness review here.

We ran user research sessions with people from funding, research and policy spheres as we developed Reach. As a technical team this increased our awareness of the fact that policy making is created in a myriad of ways and is influenced by a mixture of advocacy, evidence and timing.

We know that citations do not tell the whole story of how policy has been created but we hope that Reach becomes a starting point for people wanting to track how scientific research influences global health and governments.

Reach is in an ‘alpha’ stage, so this is our first iteration of solving this problem for users. This means that there could be bugs or results produced that are not 100% right. Our goal has been to release Reach so we can learn from usage and improve. We will be continually developing the product to provide best results.

To get in touch, participate in our research or provide any feedback after using Reach contact us here.