‘It’s more complicated that that’ must be the official war cry of scientists and researchers. I have a great deal of sympathy for you, having read some brutal misrepresentations of interesting work. Sometimes it’s not so much distortion or inaccuracy, but simply the soul-destroying moment when someone’s work is presented without any of the excitement that must inspire them as a researcher.

So here’s a bit of inspiration from the chemistry team at the University of Nottingham. Admittedly, it helps considerably if your work includes lots of opportunities to blow things up (on purpose).

In September, 2007 Nottingham Science City took the bold decision to appoint a filmmaker-in-residence, Brady Haran, which led to Test Tube. He was determined to show science in a new light – warts and all. ‘I didn’t just want pretty pictures or a constant stream of “breakthroughs”, he said. ‘I wanted to show what real scientists are like and how they work. Along with the spectacular, this can include disappointments, hardship or just some hard slog on a tedious experiment.’

Remember that periodic table that you probably learned at school, even if you didn’t go on to study science at a higher level? It seems to have grown since my day, but I will be relearning it now, because the Nottingham team have made a video for every element in the table, and I’m going to watch them all. Not today, but it’s very handy to have such a large selection on hand, just waiting for that moment when you’re trying to avoid a really tedious bit of work yourself.

One of the greatest charms of these videos – apart from the delightful Professor Martyn Poliakoff’s genuine mad-scientist hair and fabulous ties – is that they aren’t overplanned. They don’t try to tell you everything there is to know about each element, but you are still left thinking ‘hmmm, I never knew that’. And they keep you coming back for more. Two of my favourites are Sodium and Potassium.

But they aren’t doing these videos just to make you jealous that your job isn’t quite so volatile. There is a very interesting explanation of this year’s Nobel prize for chemistry, and one of the team celebrate having a paper published in a peer-reviewed journal by explaining to viewers what it’s all about.

There’s even an international development angle, when Pete Licence (who really likes to blow things up) travels to Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia, where he is Adjunct Professor and lectures on sustainability and green chemistry.

Word processors have changed dramatically the way we all work. There is still a lot for editors to do, but today it is a easier for authors to get their text right. And with so much more being published and budgets constrained, the fact of life is that most material is never edited, so the more authors can get right, the better the final product will be.

The aim of editing is to ensure that the reader is able to understand just what the author is trying to convey. Even if the substance is there, if the language is ambiguous, or the text tiring or distracting to read, the author can quickly lose some of the audience that they had gained. If you can’t afford an editor you can help your project’s future readers enormously by developing a ‘house style’ for all your written outputs.

Some house style manuals are very detailed, and in addition to standardising spelling they cover the way one ought to use words and phrases, as well as guide design such as styles of headings and text fonts. But even if you cover only the ten points below, you will make your written materials much more consistent, and create fewer distractions for your readers. Below them are some links to the house style guides of some very well-known publications – they are interesting reads in themselves, but you can always choose one of them and ask your authors to follow that style, and then add any extra rules specific to your project. I have also included a link to a good online guide to English usage, and to the Plain English Campaign’s ‘A-Z of Alternative Words’, which might persuade your authors to use more of our short clear Saxon-origin words instead of their longer Latin-inspired cousins.

Ten key house style points

1. Decide on basic British vs American spellings , plus s or z if you go for British, then add any exceptions for your own version of English, which varies across the world. A list of the most obvious spelling choices is helpful, but you can also choose and specify a particular dictionary.

2. Every field has its own jargon and specialist terms, including acronyms. Make a list of these with agreed spellings for authors (and definitely for editors).

3. Decide whether to use single or double quotes, a comma after the second-last item in a list or not (e.g. She carried a bag, ball, and stick.), % or per cent or percent, USD or US$, Dr or Dr. and eg or e.g. for abbreviations, metric or imperial measurements, and clarify any other text where there is more than one correct spelling.

4. Many projects work in well-defined countries or geographical areas. Make a list of the key place names, people, organisations, currencies, local context terms (e.g. parliament or assembly), and non-English words that will be regularly used in project outputs.

5. Agree which typeface or font your projects will use for which outputs, and which heading styles (size, font, and use of capital letters). This will prevent enthusiastic but inexperienced authors from peppering their papers with far too many variations. This includes indenting paragraphs (in general and after headings), and the style for table headings and labels, and figure and photograph captions.

6. Agree how citations and references should appear, so that readers can search for information easily and time and money is not wasted having to standardise them after the document is ready for publication.

7. Make sure anyone who is producing outputs in your project has the correct logo, has a high-resolution version for printing and a low-resolution version for electronic uses, and knows the difference.

8. Unnecessary spaces in your document will make word processing software behave unpredictably when it comes to layout. Remove any extra spaces at the end of headings and paragraphs, in tables, and only leave one space after a full stop at the end of a sentence. (Double and even triple spaces were necessary when documents were typewritten. It gave the writer some extra space to play with when they had to go back and paint out and correct mistakes.)

9. Make sure any document that is likely to be printed out contains all your contact details as well as citation details for the document itself on an inside page (not just on the cover, which is often removed on pdfs), including the web address if it’s available online. Hotlinks are convenient in electronic papers, but the key information is hidden once the document is printed out.

10. Use capital letters, bold, and italics sparingly.

Some useful links:

BBC News Style Guide

Guardian Style Guide

The Economist Style Guide

Chicago Manual of Style

Common Errors in English Usage by Paul Brians

Plain English Campaign’s ‘The A–Z of Alternative Words’

TARGETS RPC and Panos London’s Relay Programme recently formed a four-way collaboration that linked their respective partners ZAMBART (Zambia AIDS-Related TB Project) and Panos Relay Southern Africa, both based in Lusaka, Zambia. Having worked together on a media toolkit on reporting TB last year, both partners saw an ideal opportunity to  engage further and bring researchers and journalists face to face to discuss their shared ground.

The idea behind the partnership was to link our experiences in health research and media capacity-building to raise debate about TB in the Zambian media. In the process, we wanted to highlight research as a valuable source for journalists, and make that research more accessible through building trust and practical skills for journalists and researchers to work together.

The Reporting Research Workshop: Raising Media Debate Around TB was co-facilitated by TARGETS, Panos Relay, and ZAMBART, with lead researchers and media experts designing and delivering joint sessions to bridge the gap and facilitate exchange between the 20 journalists and 8 researchers who participated.

Here’s a film that shows some of the issues we tackled over the two days:

What follows is not exactly ‘lessons learned’, but a list of (by no means easy) questions that came up as we progressed with this incredibly fruitful collaboration between four organisations working in different fields and contexts.

1. How can the mutual value of working together be converted into practical skills and working relationships?

Often one critical and very practical barrier to communication is specialist language, and what is perceived by journalists to be scientific jargon. We put everyone on the spot to address this issue, asking journalists to define a list of TB-related words and researchers to refine these definitions in ‘lay’ terms. It wasn’t as easy as either group expected.  Where a journalist wants to know the ‘straightforward’ meaning of an acronym for a TB treatment such as DOTS (Directly Observed Treatment, Shortcourse), for example, researchers want to ensure that the nuances of what the acronym really means are included: DOTS represents an entire five-point strategy for TB treatment in Zambia, not just the medication. The session provided an opportunity for challenging definitions and clarifying information, forcing both journalists and researchers to think again, and then again.

2. Where does the responsibility of researchers end and that of journalists begin?

How far should researchers have to take their research to make it accessible to other audiences? How deeply should the journalists be engaging with the research in order to take it to broader audiences? During the workshop, ZAMBART researchers presented their methods and findings to the journalists in PowerPoint presentations. The journalists were keen to get the facts straight and ask questions afterwards. There was a lot of ground to cover so many of the researchers’ presentations overran. It was remarked that in fact, what the journalists needed to see first and foremost were the researchers’ ‘Conclusion’ slides, where they can get an immediate idea of the ‘so what?’ factor and follow up with their own questions and research. Modifying the usual way of both communicating academic research and going about journalistic research would seem invaluable if both sides are to meet in the middle as partners, rather than expecting the other to come to them.

3. Don’t forget the media! How can we ensure the media is viewed as a stakeholder in research?

One very important outcome of the workshop was the recognition that journalists can help dispel myths and educate communities about TB transmission to combat the stigmatisation of people with TB and its link with HIV – but rarely are they included as a key partner. The workshop involved some reflexive exercises from a TB anti-stigma toolkit developed using ZAMBART research for use in communities. Its success in making the journalists think about stigma from their own experience, and highlighting the role of the media in perpetuating or helping to reduce stigma, showed that journalists as a potentially influential ‘community’ of key information users had thus far been neglected.

4.  The Long View: Institutionalising research communication

As always, there was so much to cover in our workshop but so little time… As part of the collaboration, TARGETS and ZAMBART have funded 10 Panos Media fellowships to enable a group of journalists to follow up some of the story ideas that they developed as part of the practical skills training in the workshop, led by an Editorial team from Panos Southern Africa. However, further questions about the sustainability of research and media capacity to engage with one another arose from some of the discussions about journalism as a professional career, specialising in health, and embedding communication into the research process. How might it be possible to introduce reporting research into existing journalism training? And how can we build institutional support for researchers and journalists to work together more efficiently in developing countries?  Panos London’s Relay Programme and TARGETS RPC are both working to address these issues.

For further information about TARGETS RPC visit our website, or contact Alexandra.Hyde@lshtm.ac.uk.
For further information about the Panos Relay Programme go to the Panos London website, or contact Annie.Hoban@panos.org.uk.

Friendship or Friction? DFID Lunchtime Session at the World Conference of Science Journalists, June 2009

The more I learn about the way people make decisions, the more I wish I’d studied psychology.

We’ve evolved, but not as much as we think we have. Or at least our brains are still very much running mainly on gut instinct and instant reaction. It’s a situation that has served us well in the past, but isn’t necessarily appropriate to making rational decisions from the wealth of varied choices that we often have on offer today.

Policymakers have a plethora of stakeholders out there, and a paucity of resources. They have an unenviable job, sorting the wheat from the chaff, and choosing which among all the worthwhile research proposals to fund and support.

Irrationality by psychology professor Stewart Sutherland was first published in 1992, but is still a gripping (and funny) read nearly twenty years later. It describes many experiments that prove time and time again how we are all swayed by forces beyond our control unless we actively avoid the traps. With chapters titles that include ‘Ignoring the evidence’, ‘Distorting the evidence’, and ‘Misinterpreting the evidence’, there is something to make anyone’s jaw drop in disbelief.

Even if it doesn’t provide clear instructions about how to ensure a policymaker makes the decision that you want, it certainly provides clues to why they might not. For example, Sutherland shows just how strongly we resist changing our minds about a decision once we have said it in public, a situation that politicians and policymakers get bounced into all the time.

There are good lessons for researchers too. Experiments showed how committees or meetings made up of like-minded people not only fail to properly consider evidence that is contrary to their current opinion, finding myriad ways to discount its credibility, but also emerge having taken a collective position on an issue that is stronger than the position that any of the group members hold individually. If you are forming a steering or oversight committee and want it done properly, do make sure you include people who genuinely hold a range of different opinions and views. If you are creating an interdisciplinary team to carry out a research project, do consider finding room for a pyschologist. And do read the book. You won’t regret it and you may even make better decisions yourself as a result.

Isn’t it always the way? Just when you think that you’re getting along like a house on fire, speaking the same language, enjoying a meeting of minds, humming the same kazoo… Okay, I made that last one up, but you know what I mean. It’s easy to believe that two people who want the same outcome – let’s just say a researcher and a policymaker – can have an long-running conversation and know just what each other means along the way. Then suddenly, screeeeeech. The policymaker, for no reason that the researcher can immediately understand, brings the whole dialogue to a stop. The researcher retreats to their corner, and plays back the whole sad drama in their mind. Where did we go wrong?

Most researchers recognise that ‘dissemination’ is one small part of ‘communication’. It’s tempting when you’ve had a bruising encounter with policymaking to throw in the towel and move on. But reviewing our failures, large and small, is time well spent. Sometimes the true reason for a failure only comes to light long afterward – a particular minister had lost the confidence of their prime minister, a new policy director wanted to try out ideas that they themselves had developed during a recently completed Phd, a translator wasn’t skilled enough to convey your information the way you planned. There are infinite ways that poor communication can derail potentially good research projects. But how many failures does anyone have to survive in order to learn enough to succeed the next time? Given the length of many research projects, how does anyone ever succeed?

Fortunately the wider research community is waking up to the need to document better ways to communicate, and excellent research institutes are publishing guides to try to help researchers get it right.

The UK’s Natural Environment Research Council has recently updated and published their guide, Science into Policy: Taking part in the process. The guide is written for UK-based research and policymaking, but the sections on ‘Communicating with government’ and ‘Communicating with national parliaments and assemblies’ are good guidelines for the kind of information that any researcher should know about a government or parliament that they are trying to work with. They’ve also put together a nice ‘Top Ten Tips for communicating science to policymakers’. I particularly like ‘Remember the media’s influence on policy-makers – MPs read newspapers and listen to the radio. For example, Colin Challen MP put forward a bill on a Domestic Tradable Quotas Scheme for reducing greenhouse gas emissions (a Tyndall Centre proposal), after hearing a report about it on Radio 4’s Today programme.’ There are nine more, but to find out what they say you’ll just have to read the report yourself.

R4D’s Communication Corner is putting together a list of documents that can help you plan, carry out, and evaluate your communications work. Let us know which you documents you’ve used that you think we should include.

While many researchers and development projects struggle to get even a single relevant mention in their local newspaper, one project in Uganda has been receiving blanket coverage on another continent. Katine, a rural sub-county in the north-eastern part of the country, has been the location for a three-year project between the community, the UK newspaper The Guardian, the African Medical and Research Foundation (Amref) and Farm-Africa. PANOS has also been working with the project to ensure that the people living in Katine are able to contribute to the online resource.

The Guardian’s website devotes a whole section to the project, and there are new stories almost every day. The project planned to focus on education, health, water, governance and livelihoods, but has had to be flexible to respond to conditions in the communities, and to the needs of its media partner. The £2.5m project is being funded by donations from Guardian and Observer readers and Barclays.

The aim was to enable Guardian readers to get a more in-depth understanding of what development means in practice by following the development process and not just some highlights, and to give everyone involved, including the community, a voice. Followers of the project will have seen how difficult it has been to strike an appropriate balance, and it’s clearly been a big learning experience all round.

Katine’s Mid-Term Review has just been published, and like all the project documents is available from the website. There is also a very interesting evaluation of the MTR, (see Annex 11) written by Rick Davies, the Guardian’s independent evaluator. Mid-term reviews are notoriously difficult to get right, in the sense of making them useful to the funders, the people managing the project, and the ‘end-users’, in this case the people of Katine. There is valuable advice here about how to improve your chances of a useful evaluation by agreeing clear objectives and indicators at the beginning of the project.

The Katine website has won awards, including last year’s One World Award for New Media, and is ambitious in trying to provide a comprehensive picture of an integrated project. While few newspapers would have the resources to undertake a project on such as scale, there is scope for any newspaper to focus on and follow a particular community as they navigate the development minefield.

What do you think of the Katine project and website?
How could smaller media outlets take up a similar project on a smaller scale?
What could the Katine project have done better?

DFID funds a number of different organisations who are trying to help researchers communicate their work more effectively. This week we feature resources from two of them, SciDev.net and INASP’s AuthorAid project.

Through their website SciDev.net gives policymakers, researchers, the media and civil society both information and a platform on which to explore how science and technology can reduce poverty, improve health, and raise standards of living around the world. They also build developing countries’ capacity for communicating science and technology through regional networks of committed individuals and organisations, practical guidance, and specialist workshops.

For those who cannot attend or set up a SciDev workshop, a great place to start is SciDev.Net’s series of practical guides. The latest guide, ‘How researchers can stand up for science’ looks at how the media reports science and gives researchers pointers on how to fight poor science coverage. Other guides include ‘Communicating statistics and risk’, and ‘Planning and writing a science story’.

AuthorAid aims to bring people together to share problems and solutions, and is setting up a mentoring project that will give those with experience a chance to share what they’ve learned with colleagues who are just starting out. AuthorAid are encouraging potential mentors to register with them, in particular experienced researchers with track records of publishing, people who are diplomatic and can encourage and support
early-career researchers in developing countries, and who are committed, enthusiastic and not looking for academic gain.

Developing country researchers looking for mentors should also register, and then can search the list of people offering to mentor and contact them.

Conferences are an important way to share new research findings and connect with other researchers. The ‘poster session’ is now a mainstay of the conference circuit, but producing an effective scientific poster is actually quite an art.

Colin Purrington of Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania has written an entertaining and useful guide to making better posters. (Microsoft has even adapted his guide for their forum site – by editing out all the personality…)

In addition to including a lot of basic good sense and practical guidance that you will find useful next time you make a poster, there are even tips for the procrastinators who left it until the last minute:

If your poster is really bad, you might consider attaching a bag of sweets or crisps to the easel to lure visitors. If you situate yourself a few posters away, you can then pounce on people as they help themselves. If they have taken your food offering, they will feel obliged to stay and talk to you.

One tip suggests attaching mini-recorders to the poster where appropriate. That would be great if your poster was about music or birdsong for instance, but could also include comments from other researchers in your team, or end-users comments in their own words and voice.

He also encourages poster-makers to think about some important but unexpected issues. When you are choosing your colours, for example, do you keep in mind that a significant portion of your viewers (roughly 8% of men and 0.5% of women) are colour blind?

Purrington reminds people to use patterns as well as colours on graphics to ensure that colourblind people can follow your graphs and charts, but if you work in an office you might also wander the halls until you find someone who thinks the Ishihara circle below contains the number 70 and ask them to review your poster for you.

Given the competing demands on everyone’s time at a conference, and the fact that the poster session is often scheduled at the same time as, erm, refreshments, why not make a mini-poster on a sticky label and wear it in the bar next to your nametag? One of Purrington’s readers did just that and posted it on Slideshare. It must have been a great conversation starter. (*See below for an explanation of what she was researching if you can’t work it out!)

Have you found poster sessions to be a useful way to share your research?
If you put your posters on your website after the conference, do they get hits?
What’s your best tip for making a better scientific poster?

*I am looking at how different bacteria in wastewater treatment processes degrade estrogens. Hopefully if we discover removal mechanisms we could enhance removal of estrogens in wastewater treatment, reducing environmental impacts (can feminise male fish at 1 ng/L).

As websites have become more complex, the length of web addresses (URLs) has grown, and they have become increasingly unwieldy. Hot links and hyperlinks are fine if you are sure your reader will be online, but sometimes using a link that can be noted down easily and visited at a later date is more appropriate. Short URLs are good for printed publicity material, and also useful when including web links in Twitter, where messages can only be 140 characters long.

The website Tiny URL converts URLs of any length into much smaller ones (20 characters on average). It’s very simple to use, and has two great new features. You can now customise your tiny URL so that it is memorable rather than random. In addition, at the time you create your tiny URL you can activate a tracking option that will enable you to gather statistics about how many people click on the URL that you’ve created.

To make a tiny URL go to http://www.tiny.cc/. Simply paste into the box your long URL and click on the orange ‘Tiny it!’ button. Your new tiny URL of five random characters (for example http://tiny.cc/Px1My) will appear.

But before you click, why not customise your tiny URL? The standard URL for R4D’s Communications Corner is http://www.research4development.info/communicationsCorner.asp, but we made a tiny URL for the same page: http://tiny.cc/CommsCorner by putting ‘CommsCorner’ in the ‘Custom’ box. (Note you can also use www.tiny.cc/ as the prefix.) One warning: Don’t experiment with your preferred Custom phrase – once you’ve used it, it’s gone and you can never delete or edit it! Yes, I did lose one myself.

Finally, why not use tiny URLs to track your traffic statistics for particular marketing efforts? Note: you must set this up immediately after you create the tiny URL. After you click the ‘Tiny it!’ button, a line will appear that says: ‘Track how many people click your tiny link here’. Clicking the ‘here’ hyperlink at that time will take you to a traffic stats web page for that tiny URL. Save the address of that webpage somewhere safe, and you can return and check how many people have used your tiny URL. Each tiny URL has its own statistics page (with unique ID and code).

I’m going to make all the links in the R4D monthly e-newsletter tiny URLs from now on. A click will still take the reader straight to the news story or new document on R4D, but I will be able to see which links interest people most and try to respond. If you don’t already receive the newsletter you can sign up here.

Have you used Tiny URLs or other URL-shrinking systems?
Can you recommend especially appropriate ways to use them?
Have you used them to track your click stastics?

We often lament the lack of good ‘development’ stories in the media. Stories of hope and success, stories that try to focus on some of the issues that are difficult to explain or not the flavour of the moment.

To encourage and support this kind of writing DFID and the Guardian newspaper have teamed up for a second year of the International Development Journalism competition. The challenge, which had separate categories for amateur and professional writers, was to write a 650–1,000-word feature on one of the 16 chosen themes:

• Access to information
• Climate change
• Deforestation
• Education for street children
• Family planning in the developing world
• Green revolution?
• HIV/AIDS, TB and Malaria co-infection
• Improving food security in eastern Africa
• Pastoralism as a viable way of life
• Rehabilitation of child workers
• Safe and unsafe abortion in the developing world
• Social inclusion
• The role of the media
• Tuberculosis (TB) and TB/HIV co-infection
• Water and sanitation
• Women’s rights

The short-list of 40 stories – 20 amateur, 20 professional – was published yesterday in the Guardian. Have a look – and think about what you might help a journalist write about next year!

Most researchers working in international development aim to influence policymakers, and list them as their key target audience. Research communications advisers encourage researchers to consider using new pathways to reach those policymakers. Directness can be effective, but there’s more than one way to get to your destination and sometimes the scenic route is the most memorable one.

Reaching the general public is always tricky, but getting the public to support the policy change that you are advocating – indeed making the public your advocates – can be remarkably effective, especially when elections are looming. The public can also be great advocates when your target is a business – perhaps a pharmaceutical company? – rather than a politician. The customer is always right, after all.

This week saw a very effective – and very funny – example of consumer power at work. The issue was not about international development, but it did aim to persuade an international business to change its behaviour – specifically the ways it treats customers. Canadian musician Dave Carroll had an expensive and beloved guitar badly damaged while flying between Halifax, Canada, and Nebraska, USA. He even had the added insult of actually witnessing the baggage handlers at Chicago’s O’Hare airport throwing the band’s guitars around on the tarmac while loading them. After a year of persuing his claim for compensation through a web of customer services teams he gave up and decided to turn his rotten experience into something positive. He wrote a light-hearted and catchy song about it, made a funny video, and uploaded it to YouTube. The video went viral, catching the imagination of people around the world, and within three days it had earned more than 1.3 million views. (The number of views went up by 65,000 while I wrote this blog.) United Airlines had the good grace to acknowledge that their customer service had been inadequate (to put it mildly), announcing that the video had ‘struck a chord’ with them, and that they would be using it in future in-house training sessions.

We don’t all have the talent to match this feat, but innovative development researchers are working with performers to harness the power of art, music and social media to spread their message. In April this year Malaria No More celebrated World Malaria Day by teaming up with actor Ashton Kutcher and journalist Larry King of CNN. The two had a contest to see who could be the first to sign up a million Twitter followers – the winner to donate 10,000 bednets to the campaign. Guess who won?

Next week in R4D’s Communications Corner Podium blog we’ll hear from William Mapham, Director of Communications and Advocacy at the Reproductive Health and HIV Research Unit, University of Witwatersrand. They are partners in the DFID research programme consortium ‘Research and Capacity Building in Reproductive and Sexual Health and HIV/AIDS in Developing Countries’, and ran a very interesting campaign in South Africa using mobile phone texting on World Aids Day last year. Sign up for R4D’s Communications Podium blog to make sure you don’t miss William’s post, and let us know about your experiences too!

Have you worked with artists to help promote your messages to new audiences?
Are you using social media sites to reach new people and say new things?
What have you learned about using these new tools?

by Helen Smith, International Health Group, Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. Email: cjdhel@liv.ac.uk

Background

Ready access to reliable and up-to-date research can help doctors make informed decisions about best practice, and improve patient care and outcomes. Healthcare professionals in training in Sub-Saharan Africa could also benefit from better electronic access to reliable, up-to-date medical knowledge and literature. A major constraint, however, is the high commercial on-line subscription costs for many journals.

The World Health Organization enables free access to full text articles in low-income countries via the HINARI programme (Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative), which provides free or very low-cost online access to 3,300 major journals in biomedical and related social sciences to local, non-profit institutions in developing countries. There are presently 2,000 institutions in 106 countries registered for HINARI. During 2005, users at these institutions downloaded more than 3,500,000 articles. There are 113 countries eligible for HINARI. In some cases journals charge a reduced price to developing countries, and there are also open-access journals.

The DFID-funded Effective Health Care Research Consortium has a remit to produce Cochrane Reviews in malaria, tuberculosis, diarrhoea and tropical diseases; the other core activity of the Consortium is promoting use of this evidence in health policy and practice in low- and middle-income countries. Ready access to the Cochrane Library and other subscription journals is a prerequisite for health practitioners and policymakers making evidence-informed decisions. We wanted to find out levels of awareness and use of online medical information among future medical leaders in African countries.

To do this we conducted a survey in October 2006 to describe internet access patterns and awareness of initiatives that enable free access among postgraduate doctors working in national medical institutions in four countries in Africa, and used semi-structured interviews to explore what factors influence use.

Main findings

• We found high and regular use of the internet among postgraduate doctors in four selected national medical institutions in Africa, and internet cafés are the most important internet access point for two of the four institutions studied.
• Among these doctors, awareness of free access initiatives is variable; it is highest for PubMed and lowest for BioMedCentral.
• HINARI helps access in some research-led institutions, but there are problems with organising distribution of passwords in others, and some users report difficulties making HINARI work.

In discussions with policymakers, we drew out the following policy implications relevant to three different sorts of policy specialist or manager:

Senior staff in medical training institutions

• HINARI is important and ensures free access to subscription journals in low-income countries.
• HINARI is critically dependent on the political and managerial commitment of deans and senior managers in postgraduate institutions. They need to ensure access is organised, advertised, and managed.
• Small, carefully managed investments in connectivity will increase access to a large amount of up-to-date medical literature.
• There is a demand from postgraduate doctors for specific training in accessing up-to-date online articles and formal orientation to available online resources. Deans and senior managers need to ensure effective training for post-graduate and undergraduate students is provided.
• Senior managers need to review the role of librarians in this new environment, as medical staff and students shift to online resources as their main source of up-to-date information. Job descriptions need revising, staff may need to be retrained and re-skilled, and the role of information technology within institutions adjusted.

National policymakers

• Increasing evidence-informed decision-making in the health sector requires access to up-to-date medical knowledge. Ministries of education and health could seek tax discounts on computer equipment for medical institutions and health professionals to enable access to online medical knowledge.
• Evidence-informed practice requires clinicians trained in understanding and using current best evidence. Ministries of health could seek to revise national curricula to both include critical appraisal of current research and training in information resource use, and make accessing up-to-date online articles a strict requirement.
• Institutional research capacity may be strengthened by securing better links to the international research community through effective access to online journals.
• Internet cafés may be useful commercially run centres where medical staff can access essential health information.

International stakeholders

• Many doctors in national medical institutions in Africa remain unaware of HINARI and are not regular users; this raises concern over the visibility and promotion of the programme.
• Most doctors are aware of PubMed (Medline) but report problems accessing free full-text articles and this may be because they are not logged into HINARI; WHO may consider advertising the ‘search through PubMed’ function more widely, particularly on the PubMed website.
• Commonly reported technical problems accessing materials for free suggests HINARI may wish to review the ease of use of its interface. HINARI welcome feedback and are already making steps to improve access.

by Annabelle South, Evidence for Action

Background

Evidence for Action is an RPC (DFID-funded research programme consortium) with partners in India, Malawi, Uganda, UK and Zambia. Most of the partners in the consortium are primarily research organisations, and whilst all partners were in regular communication with key stakeholders, developing a communications strategy was a new challenge for many of the partners. During the inception period of the RPC the lead partner the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and partner the AIDS Alliance worked together to develop a communications strategy for the consortium. This first strategy focused on our principles for communication, but lacked concrete objectives and ‘how to’. It was recognised that more work needed to be done on the strategy, and that all the partners needed to be involved in this process.

Each Evidence for Action partner has a person responsible for communications related to the consortium. In most cases this person is a researcher already employed by the partner, without communications expertise.

The process

We decided to organise a workshop to develop country-level communications strategies, and increase communications capacity in both strategic planning and carrying out communications activities. Before the workshop each partner was asked to complete an Interest – Alignment – Influence matrix of stakeholders in their country. The workshop itself was facilitated by Enrique Mendizabal and Laura Jarque of ODI, who took us through the process of developing a strategy using various tools available in their online toolkits (http://www.odi.org.uk/rapid/Tools/Toolkits/index.html). Participants were split into groups for each country, and there was regular feedback and peer assist between the groups.

The third day of the workshop was devoted to capacity-building activities, with staff from the AIDS Alliance leading sessions on speaking and writing for non-academic audiences, and communities of practice.

Following the workshop, participants returned to their organisations, discussed the draft strategies with their colleagues, then revised and wrote them up. These were then shared with the Community of Practice, and an overall strategy (bringing together the principles from the first version of the strategy and the country-level strategies drawn up following the workshop). This was then shared with the Programme Management Committee, approved by the Community of Practice, and submitted to DFID.

Lessons learned

• Having external facilitators was very useful – it meant that we could draw on their experience, and everyone from the RPC at the workshop could participate in the group work.
• Getting communications reps to meet with colleagues before the workshop to work on the interest–alignment–influence matrices was useful to gain a wider input into the process of developing a strategy, and to increase knowledge and ownership.
• It is important that country-level communications strategies fit in with the priorities and interests of the partner(s) involved. The draft strategy for Malawi drawn up at the workshop did not fit well with Lighthouse’s priorities and interests, and little was done on it following the workshop as it was low priority. Once this was recognised, Lighthouse revised the strategy to make it more useful to them, making communicating strategically a higher priority.
• Following the workshop it did take more time than anticipated for the country-level strategies to be finalised, as communications reps needed to consult with colleagues and get approval from their organisations.
• The strategies that have resulted from the workshop are all very different in format and content.
• If we were doing it again, and had more time, I would consider including more activity planning in the workshop.
• As no-one from our Indian partners was able to attend the main workshop, a mini-workshop was held to develop the India communications strategy. This had the advantage that more people from that partner were able to take part, but it was unfortunate that they were unable to benefit from input from other partners, or assist other partners with their strategies.
• The workshop was useful and positive, and resulted in better country-level communications strategies than if we had asked partners to write strategies without the support and training the workshop provided. It also built up other communications skills, and strengthened relationships between the partners.