New project at the CSTS group

Practice-based research: investigating research practices, outputs and impacts in Belgium-Flanders, Poland and Switzerland

This external page three-year research project funded by the Weave programme “external page Research funding without borders” from the Swiss National Science Foundation (period 2025-2027), is a great opportunity for the CSTS Group to enlarge its international collaborations.

Over the past few decades there has been a growing interest in models of research that challenge the “basic vs. applied research” dichotomy by focusing simultaneously on scientific knowledge creation and real-life problem-solving. This includes practice-based research (PBR) – a form of research which is grounded in, informed by, and intended to improve professional practice. PBR is conducted by practitioner-researchers or teams composed of researchers and practitioners, and typically takes place in practice settings - such as clinical centres, schools, worksites, art studios, etc. It prioritizes knowledge co-production with the intention to solve real-world problems.

As such, it relates closely to the notion of transdisciplinarity as it entails inter-sectoral collaborations between researchers and professionally-oriented communities, and integration of expertise drawn from various disciplines and professions. Since the 2000s, there has been a growing interest in PBR in various and seemingly distinct fields of research activity, such as healthcare, social work, education, management studies, law, or art & design. However, we still know very little about PBR as a research strategy; in particular, we lack systematized and cross-disciplinary knowledge on practice-based research processes, outputs and impacts. Consequently, we do not have adequate models for registering PBR outputs and their evaluation.

To address this knowledge gap, the project pursues a transversal objective – to improve understanding of practice-based research (PBR) – operationalized by three closely related specific objectives: (1) to study PBR practices and improve understanding of knowledge co-production processes and boundary work between research, practice and academia; (2) to understand the nature and varieties of PBR outcomes and increase knowledge about non-traditional research outputs; (3) to identify and systematize practice impact of PBR and set the stage for its assessment by developing a framework for disclosing PBR outputs.

The project adopts a multifaced approach using a variety of data sources and methods and engaging research teams in three countries where complementary resources to study PBR are available: Belgium-Flanders (ECOOM - Vrije Universiteit Brussel), Switzerland (CSTS, TdLab – D-USYS, ETH Zürich), and Poland (Science Studies Lab, University of Warsaw). The research methodology combines bibliometric and scientometric analysis, in-depth interviews and text-mining techniques. Bibliometric and scientometric analysis will be used to map the landscape of PBR, provide a systematic study of non-traditional research outputs (non-academic publications and non-written outputs), and produce a systematic review. Interviews will be conducted with researchers working in a variety of SSH and STEM fields as well as members of evaluation panels in order to study transdisciplinary PBR practices. A mix of text-mining techniques (keyword-in-context, topic modelling, deep mining) will be used to analyse impact case studies provided by higher education and research institutions. The inclusion of data sources and expertise from three countries will enable a complementary and comparative approach to study PBR outputs, practices and impacts.

The findings from this research project will significantly contribute to the field of science studies – by providing new knowledge on practitioner-based research strategies and knowledge co-production processes – and to a variety of STEM and SSH fields where PBR is used, including applied research in a range of disciplines, and artistic and practitioner-led research in the humanities and social sciences. The project will help better understand the societal impact of science and provide methodologies and frameworks for the evaluation of practitioner research; thus, it will offer new insights into both the theory and practice of research evaluation and policymaking.