Examining self-described policy-relevant evidence base for policymaking: an evidence map of COVID-19 literature

Abstract

Background: Evidence-based policymaking is a paradigm aimed at increasing the use of evidence by actors involved in policymaking processes. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted a heavy reliance on emerging evidence for policymaking during emergencies.

Objective: This study describes the focus and types of evidence in journal articles self-described as relevant to policymaking using the COVID-19 pandemic as a case study, identifying gaps in evidence and highlighting author stated perceived biases specifically in evidence-based policy making.

Design: Evidence mapping.

Data sources: We systematically searched SCOPUS, PubMed and LexisNexis for literature identifying policy-relevant evidence available on the COVID-19 pandemic.

Eligibility criteria: The study included only peer-reviewed literature identified as 'article', 'book chapter', 'review' covering the period from January 2020 to December 2022. Inclusion criteria required that articles have an abstract, authorship attribution and are written in English.

Data extraction and synthesis: A minimum of two authors independently extracted and coded for every level and final outputs were compared for consistency.

Results: A total of 213 articles met the inclusion criteria and were reviewed in this study. Lead authorship affiliations were from 50 countries with 70% of the outputs from developed economies including USA (20.2%), UK (18.3%) and Australia (7.5%). The most common purpose of the articles was the presentation of research findings the authors considered of relevance to policy (60.1%), followed by work that examined the impact of policy (28.6%) or highlighted or supported a policy need (22.5%), while some papers had multiple stated purposes. The most common challenges in policymaking identified by the authors of the reviewed papers were process failures and poor evidence utilisation during policymaking.

Conclusions: The evidence map identified the need for an interdisciplinary policy approach involving relevant stakeholders and driven by quality research as a progressive step towards prevention of future public health crises/pandemics.

Keywords: COVID-19; Public Health; SARS-CoV-2; Zoonoses.

Figure 1. Flow diagram for COVID-19 pandemic evidence evaluation.

Figure 2. Evidence map of pandemic response focus and policy focus. The figure provides a snapshot of the links between the policy cycle focus and the pandemic response strategy of the articles with the darker shades indicating intercepts where there is abundance of evidence and lighter or no shades representing little or no evidence. Note that an article could have multiple policy foci.

Figure 3. Evidence map of the distribution of evidence types by policy focus. Note that if articles were assigned to more than one category, the assignments added up to 1 (ie, if assigned to two categories each would be assigned 0.5 of an article).

Figure 4. Article authorship distribution by country. Map constructed using mapchart.net (licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0)).