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Table 3 Essential questions for developing a rapid review dissemination plan

From: Paper 4: a review of reporting and disseminating approaches for rapid reviews in health policy and systems research

1. Why do you want to raise awareness of your research?:

• to meet the urgent requirement of a knowledge user?

• to raise general awareness?

• to connect with other researchers?

• to generate national or international attention?

• to change policy or practice?

• to satisfy funders?

2. What is interesting about your findings?

• What is novel or different?

• Is it a large study?

• Are the results contrary to previous evidence?

• What is the relevance?

• Why now?

• Is it a hot topic?

• Is it seasonal?

• Does your review tap into popular trends?

• Are there action-oriented messages that will be relevant to the target audience?

3. How might you generate interest in your findings?

• Are you publishing in a journal?

• How does the journal generate awareness of papers?

4. Who will be interested? Consider the following audiences:

• General public

• Patients

• Health-care professionals

• Researchers

• Policy-makers, government

• Funders

• Corporations

5. Should I tailor the message to my audience?

• How can you make your findings interesting to target audiences?

• What are your key messages?

• Do you need simpler messages for the general public?

• How do these differ from messages for policy-makers, researchers?

6. What tools can you use to communicate? What can be shared on social mediaa ?

• Academic publication

• Presentations

• Meetings and dialogue

• Policy briefs

• News releases

• Preprint publication

• Infographics or visual abstracts

• Podcasts

• Blogs

7. Who can best help to deliver your messages?

• Different team members may be good for different platforms (e.g. television interviews, social media, blogging)

• Presenters can often be tailored to the audience (e.g. a policy-maker for health system audiences, a researcher for a large research meeting)

• A health system stakeholder may be able to talk about your research (e.g. a patient representative, a member of the public or a funding agency spokesperson)

8. How will you measure success?

• Number of reads or downloads

• Citation metricsb

• Altmetrics [36]c

  1. aTraditional media and social media can be used to publicize research findings to patients and the general public, as well as to researchers, policy-makers, and other audiences [56]. Traditional media include newspapers, radio, television, magazines, and online-only news sites. Social media encompass online and mobile tools, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, Reddit and more, where users directly create, post, and share content
  2. bA variety of metrics can be used to measure the impact of published articles or online content. Citation analysis is used to measure how often a work is cited. One example of a citation metric is the journal impact factor, published in the Web of Science’s Journal Citation Reports, which measures the impact of a journal through its citation by subsequent authors [56]
  3. cAltmetrics measure traditional and non-traditional metrics including citations and downloads to web-based scholarly articles, discussions on research blogs, media coverage, citations to public policy documents, and mentions on social networks such as Twitter or Facebook. The more hits from these sources, the higher the Altmetric score [57]
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Systematic Reviews

ISSN: 2046-4053