23 July 2026, Kenya: Research matters when people use it. A finding that could make food safer or help a family climb out of poverty is worth more when it shapes people’s decisions.
So how do you know whether your research is being used and how well? At first glance, the answer looks simple: did the research inform a decision, and for how many people?
In the settings where development research happens, it rarely works that way. Evidence does not travel in a straight line from research to dissemination, uptake, and use. It changes how people see a problem, resurfaces in a discussion months later, or shapes a decision years after the research results were first shared.
Most tools for measuring research use were built for clinical and policy settings, where the path from evidence to action is fairly structured. They do not work as well in development research, which crosses sectors and rarely moves in a straight line. Here the work is to shift stubborn problems like poverty and food insecurity, and the route from a single study to real change is long.
This creates a gap. We need tools built for how research is actually used in real-world, development settings.
In a recent paper published in “Health Research Policy and Systems”, we introduce the Research Uptake and Use Evaluation, or RUUE, designed to capture the early stages of research influence. Rather than waiting months or years to see whether evidence changes policy or practice, RUUE asks participants, directly at the point research is shared with them, how they expect to use it. We piloted RUUE in workshops in Kenya, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, Malawi, and Vietnam, engaging 206 participants across nine sessions.
The tool asks each participant six questions:
What evidence stood out?
How will it be used?
Why is it useful?
What are the barriers to use?
What are the facilitators?
What impact could this use have?
The results challenge conventional approaches to measuring research use. Most participants, 88%, named a specific finding they planned to use. But the use they described was rarely an immediate decision. Seven in ten intended to use the evidence conceptually to understand a problem more clearly before acting on it.
Citation counts and similar metrics miss this kind of use, yet it is often the first step toward a larger change. A county director of veterinary services in Kenya, reflecting on a food-safety study in slaughterhouses, put it plainly: “The findings made us realize that there are small solutions to big problems that we can implement on our own.”
Why this measurement matter
For funders and development organizations, this approach offers a more realistic view of impact. It shows which findings land with people and why they land. That “why” is the useful part: it points to where extra support could turn interest into real use.
In our pilots, RUUE took about 45 minutes at the end of a workshop and produced targeted signals about how research would be used, an early proxy for future impact. However, because research use can unfold over years, follow-up is important to assess whether intentions translate into action.
Lead author Steven Lam was struck by how it worked in practice: “I was surprised by how easy it was to use the data collection tool. During the results dissemination workshops, participants sat down and filled it out carefully, some very thoroughly. This saved a lot of time and yet provided in-depth insights into how participants would engage with the evidence shared.”
Applied across five countries in Africa and Asia, the tool reinforces a key point: research does not end with publication, its value lies in how it is taken up and applied.
This work was supported by the CGIAR Initiative on One Health and CGIAR Sustainable Animal and Aquatic Foods Program.
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