Introduction
This report will be focused on the waste of resources resulting from decisions about what research to do. After exploring investment patterns, we consider waste that ensues when the needs of potential users of research evidence (ie, policy makers, patients, professionals making practice or personal decisions, and researchers and research funders deciding which additional research should be done) are ignored and what is already known or already being researched is overlooked. We conclude with recommendations for how to reduce waste when research priorities are set.
We have approached our task using the research categories suggested by Stokes:1 pure basic research (to advance knowledge), pure applied research (to increase immediate applicability of research results in practice and policy decisions), and use-inspired basic research (to both advance knowledge and increase applicability). Stokes created a schema to represent categories, which we have adapted (figure 1). He named the quadrant representing use-inspired basic research after Louis Pasteur, because Pasteur's basic research had been motivated by the need to generate evidence relevant to reductions in morbidity, mortality, and economic costs of infections in people and animals. In our adapted schema, we have retained Pasteur in his original quadrant, but replaced Nils Bohr (the nuclear physicist) with Marie Curie in the quadrant for pure basic research, because of the medical importance of her studies of radiation. We also replaced Charles Edison (inventor of the light bulb) with Richard Doll in the quadrant for pure applied research, because of Doll's work with Bradford Hill to identify smoking as a cause of lung cancer. We have named Stokes' previously unnamed quadrant the waste quadrant to take account of the many research projects that contribute nothing or very little to knowledge or to practice and policy. As Altman lamented in a much cited 1994 report,2 we need less research, better research, and research done for the right reasons—an issue that has since been revisited several times.3, 4
Recommendations
- 1
More research on research should be done to identify factors associated with successful replication of basic research and translation to application in health care, and how to achieve the most productive ratio of basic to applied research
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Monitoring—periodic surveys of the distribution of funding for research and analyses of yields from basic research
- 2
Research funders should make information available about how they decide what research to support, and fund investigations of the effects of initiatives to engage potential users of research in research prioritisation
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Monitoring—periodic surveys of information on research funders' websites about their principles and methods used to decide what research to support
- 3
Research funders and regulators should demand that proposals for additional primary research are justified by systematic reviews showing what is already known, and increase funding for the required syntheses of existing evidence
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Monitoring—audit proposals for and reports of new primary research
- 4
Research funders and research regulators should strengthen and develop sources of information about research that is in progress, ensure that they are used by researchers, insist on publication of protocols at study inception, and encourage collaboration to reduce waste
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Monitoring—periodic surveys of progress in publishing protocols and analyses to expose redundant research