The body of scientific knowledge accumulated by the scholarly disciplines such as Developmental Psychopathology can achieve meaningful public impact if wielded and used in policy decision-making. Scientific study of how policymakers use research evidence underscores the need for researchers’ policy engagement; however, barriers in the academy create conditions in which there is a need for infrastructure that increases the feasibility of researchers’ partnership with policymakers. This need led to the development of the Research-to-Policy Collaboration model, a systematic approach for developing “boundary spanning” infrastructure, which has been experimentally tested and shown to improve policymakers’ use of research evidence and bolster researchers’ policy skills and engagement. This paper presents original research regarding the optimization of the RPC model, which sought to better serve and engage scholars across the globe. Trial findings shed light on ways to improve conditions that make good use of researchers’ time for policy engagement via a virtual platform and enhanced e-communications. Future directions, implications, and practical guidelines for how scientists can engage in the political process and improve the impact of a collective discipline are also discussed.

Building institutional and procedural bridges between science and policy is a vital role for law. Fundamental to the success of this work is the development of more sophisticated, nuanced understandings of scientific knowledge production than those which are current in legal and policy spheres. In this paper, I consider scientific controversies that have emerged in the field of human and environmental health impacts of endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs), notably around methodological approaches to identifying such chemicals and analysing the risks they pose. Building on literatures in the philosophy and sociology of science, I identify bases on which bridge-building between science and policy could proceed and discuss the role that legal normativity can play in those processes.

This study compares stem cell research policymaking by legislators and citizens in the United States. First, using exit poll results from a 2006 stem cell research initiative in Missouri, the study finds that deeply held personal values such as religious beliefs and views of abortion predominate in an individual’s voting decision on this issue; second, an analysis of voting behavior by senators on the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act of 2005 finds that senators make their voting decisions based on their personal policy preferences rather than their constituents’ preferences; and third, the complexity of the Missouri citizen initiative is compared with that of the legislation in the U.S. Senate, finding that the language of the citizen initiative is more sophisticated than the language of the legislative act. These findings provide the context for a broader discussion of the role of citizens and legislators in making policy for science.

Agriculture provides many benefits to people, such as producing food and creating jobs in rural areas, but it can also have negative impacts on the environment. We analysed existing monitoring indicators for the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) to evaluate whether the CAP is effectively achieving multiple social and environmental goals. We found that the current CAP monitoring system is unable to balance many potentially competing goals because its indicators are biased towards a few objectives. We suggest the European Union and its Member States adopt a broader set of indicators covering clear targets when the policy is reformed after 2020.

The innovations developed by scientists working on animal welfare are often not adopted in practice. In this paper, we argue that one important reason for this failure is that the solutions proposed do not adequately address the societal concerns that motivated the original research. Some solutions also fail because they do not adequately address perceived constraints within the industry. Using examples from our own recent work, we show how research methods from the social sciences can address both of these limitations. For example, those who persist in tail-docking cattle (despite an abundance of evidence showing that the practice has no benefits) often justify their position by citing concern for cow cleanliness. This result informs the nature of new extension efforts directed at farmers that continue to tail dock, suggesting that these efforts will be more effective if they focus on providing producers with methods (of proven efficacy) for keeping cows clean. Work on pain mitigation for dehorning shows that some participants reluctant to provide pain relief believe that the pain from this procedure is short lasting and has little impact on the calf. This result informs the direction of new biological research efforts to understand both the magnitude and duration of any suffering that result from this type of procedure. These, and other examples, illustrate how social science methodologies can document the shared and divergent values of different stakeholders (to ensure that proposed solutions align with mainstream values), beliefs regarding the available evidence (to help target new scientific research that meets the perceived gaps), and barriers in implementing changes (to ease adoption of ideas by addressing these barriers).

This article investigates the conditions under which government officials who implement policy integrate the best available science into regulatory practice. It examines the adoption of rapid wetland assessment tools, a type of science policy innovation, by street-level bureaucrats in six US Mid-Atlantic states. These bureaucrats operate in relatively opaque and discretion-laden institutional settings. The analysis of an original survey of state wetland officials shows that these officials are more likely to adopt tools when they have more opportunities to learn tool-related information and practice norms. Bureaucrats’ adoption of this class of science policy innovations appears facilitated by peer communication via network ties, on-the-job experience and incentives and disincentives associated with bureaucrats’ organisational contexts and operating environments.

Global environmental changes present unprecedented challenges to humans and the ecosystems upon which they depend. The need for interdisciplinary approaches to solve such multidimensional challenges is clear, however less clear is whether current attempts to cross disciplinary boundaries are succeeding. Indeed, efforts to further interdisciplinary approaches remain hampered by failures in assessing their scope and success. Here a set of measures examined the interdisciplinarity of the environmental sciences and tested two literature-based hypotheses: (1) newer and larger disciplines are more interdisciplinary; and (2) interdisciplinary research has lower impact factors than its counterparts. In addition, network analysis was used to map interdisciplinarity and determine the relative extent to which environmental science disciplines draw on alternative disciplinary perspectives. Contrary to expectations, age and size of a discipline had no effect on measures of interdisciplinarity for papers published in 2006, though metrics indicated larger articles and journals were more interdisciplinary. In addition, interdisciplinary research had a greater impact factor than its more strictly disciplinary peers. Network analysis revealed disciplines acting as ‘interdisciplinary frontiers’, bridging critical gaps between otherwise disparate subject areas. Whilst interdisciplinarity is complex, a combination of diversity metrics and network analysis provides valuable preliminary insights for interdisciplinary environmental research policy. The successful promotion of interdisciplinarity is needed to help dispel commonly perceived barriers to interdisciplinarity and create opportunities for such work by increasing the space available for different disciplines to encounter each other. In particular, the networks presented highlight the importance of considering disciplinary functioning within the wider context, to ensure maximum benefit to the scientific community as a whole.

Multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary working has for long been advocated in gerontology, and sometimes contested. Although collaboration between disciplines is common practice in many areas of ageing research, much remains to be done to develop and support such work. Internationally, funding agencies, scientific associations and other stakeholders in ageing research are actively involved in establishing the methods and means to promote cross-disciplinary co-operation in the field. In the United Kingdom (UK) since the late 1990s, the statutory Research Councils with key interests in ageing and older people have been actively pursuing research programmes that feature multi-disciplinarity and inter-disciplinarity. The National Collaboration on Ageing Research (NCAR), a partnership among four of the Research Councils to stimulate cross-disciplinary collaboration, worked with scientists, funding bodies, and research users to develop approaches to multi- and inter-disciplinary research, and their work informed the New Dynamics of Ageing (NDA) Programme, a major cross-Research Council programme of multi-disciplinary research which spans the social, medical, biological and engineering sciences and the arts and humanities. Drawing on the authors' participation in these activities, this article reviews key developments in the promotion of multi-disciplinary science on ageing in the UK and highlights how this is being pursued in the NDA Programme.

Solving complex problems in large-scale research programmes requires cooperation and division of labour. Simultaneously, large-scale problem solving also gives rise to unintended side effects. Based upon 5 years of researching two large-scale nutrigenomic research programmes, we argue that problems are fragmented in order to be solved. These sub-problems are given priority for practical reasons and in the process of solving them, various changes are introduced in each sub-problem. Combined with additional diversity as a result of interdisciplinarity, this makes reassembling the original and overall goal of the research programme less likely. In the case of nutrigenomics and health, this produces a diversification of health. As a result, the public health goal of contemporary nutrition science is not reached in the large-scale research programmes we studied. Large-scale research programmes are very successful in producing scientific publications and new knowledge; however, in reaching their political goals they often are less successful.

This study sets out to determine if the interest in and study of natural sciences is declining in western countries as scientists currently contend. Part one demonstrates how survey results reveal a decline of interest in scientific news in the EU. Part two explores the decline of interest further through examining data such as the number of students interested in scientific subjects and scientific careers. I explore the hypothesis that the lack of interest in scientific subjects is influenced by the culture of the mass media, and the manner in which the media covers scientific items. I examine a range of media outlets, from reality TV shows and TV series, to movies and the press. Many aspects of this paper have been discussed in depth in my book published in 2008: La razón estrangulada (Reason Strangled: the Crisis of Science in Contemporary Society).

A revolution is occurring in information exchange among gerontologists worldwide. For research investigators the increasingly easy accessibility of public use datasets promises to facilitate both research training and useful exchange of evidence. A brief history of the development of public use datasets for research in ageing is provided, and datasets of particular interest are described. While the illustrations focus on experience in the United States the implications of these developments for training and communication among gerontologists worldwide are noted.