Sponsored reports

David Baxter on the interface between research and policy

Abstract

This non-peer reviewed interview, originally published on The Grey Lit Café podcast, is published as part of the Critical Gambling Studies blog.

Citation
Sponsored reports: David Baxter on the interface between research and policy. The Grey Lit Café. https://thegreylitcafe.buzzsprout.com/1936705/10829288-sponsored-reports-david-baxter-on-the-interface-between-research-and-policy

Description
A significant portion of gambling research funding comes from non-academic sponsors—mainly governments or government-organized bodies — and the output of the sponsored project is usually a research report to the sponsor rather than academic journal articles or books. Research published in this way is of comparable quality to academic publications, but is referred to by librarians and information managers as "grey literature" because its limited distribution can make it difficult to discover and manage.

Many academic journal articles on gambling are in fact spin-offs that originated from such sponsored projects. Researchers adapt their work into academic articles to reach new audiences and build the academic body of knowledge, but also because grey literature contributions receive much less recognition in academics' career evaluations.

In this episode of The Grey Lit Café, David Baxter has a critical discussion with host Anthony Haynes about the challenges gambling researchers face when doing sponsored research, how the conflicts of interest of sponsored research shape the academic body of knowledge on gambling, and ways that gambling researchers and government sponsors can better support each other's needs as well as the needs of people experiencing gambling harms whom the sponsored research is intended to help.