Producing and Translating Research:
Relevant, timely, accessible, and actionable knowledge

Producing and translating research into relevant, timely, accessible, and actionable knowledge can help practitioners and stakeholders address their most important challenges.

Academic research is often directed at questions and produced on timelines that are unresponsive to practitioner and stakeholder needs. Research articles are often couched in inaccessible language, and the vast landscape of research findings can be difficult to navigate. In order to ensure that new knowledge is relevant, timely, accessible, and actionable, research needs to be focused on questions relevant to practitioners and stakeholders, produced on responsive timelines, translated into accessible language, and curated for actionable insights.  

Emerging research findings provide guidance for producing and translating research in ways that are relevant, timely, accessible and actionable for stakeholders. For example, decision makers are more responsive to new research findings when they have helped to define projects’ research questions Bonargent 2024). Stakeholders are also more responsive to research when bodies of findings have been translated into simple impact metrics like standardized cost-effectiveness measures Vivalt and Coville 2023, Toma and Bell 2023). Finally, providing decision makers with additional support to translate research findings into actionable implementation designs can increase the adoption of research into policy and practice (DellaVigna et al 2024).

The Social Science Research Council has extensive experience in producing relevant, timely, accessible, and actionable research that is responsive to stakeholder needs. We build data dashboards that illuminate patterns in complex administrative datasets and translate research findings into accessible and standardized impact metrics. We construct online knowledge platforms that curate bodies of research literature to identify actionable insights, and support stakeholders as they work to implement those insights. In all of our research production and translation work, we are supported by an efficient and responsive administrative infrastructure that excels at project management, effective communications, online platform and dashboard development, award administration, and outcome reporting.