Reports of practitioners’ use of public affairs faculty published research

ABSTRACT

Using a unique dataset built around published papers in top quality public policy, public administration and program evaluation journals, we find that 29.7% of respondent authors indicate that the knowledge from their articles was used by policymakers or public administrators. These data are used to test for different patterns of use for policy vs management knowledge. Findings suggest that journal quality positively affects policy use but negatively affects management use and that topics suggested by practitioners affect management use but not policy use. The researchers’ degree of motivation to have their work used is important in both types of knowledge use. Overall, the results suggest there may be greater spillovers to practical use derived from standard academic publishing pursuits than generally believed.

KEYWORDS:

• Knowledge utilization
• research use
• public affairs practitioners
• research authors
• public affairs research

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Correction

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article was originally published with errors, which have now been corrected in the online version. Please see Correction (https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2023.2200657)

Notes

1 We use the term ‘knowledge utilization’ because it has come into common usage for those studying the application of social, behavioral, and policy research to public affairs (e.g., Marsh and Glassick 1988; Neilson 2001; Blake and Ottoson 2009). In common academic parlance, the term does not include the usage of physical or natural sciences research.