Facilitating collaboration between public health researchers and policymakers: a scoping review of global practices, barriers and facilitators

TL;DR

This paper reviews global practices to improve collaboration between public health researchers and policymakers, highlighting strategies that help turn research into real-world policies.

Contribution

The study identifies co-production of knowledge as both a deliberate strategy and an emergent outcome in research-policy collaboration.

Findings

Four interdependent strategies for effective collaboration include co-production, capacity building, structured communication, and governance frameworks.

Formalized and sustained collaborations are more likely to result in increased research uptake and policy impact.

Institutional support and iterative engagement are critical for embedding research into policymaking.

Abstract

Effective collaboration between public health researchers and policymakers is critical for translating evidence into actionable policies. However, such collaboration is often undermined by misaligned priorities, structural barriers, and fragmented systems. This scoping review synthesizes global evidence on the strategies, facilitators and barriers shaping these collaborations, with a focus on how they enhance the uptake and use of research in policymaking.

A scoping review was conducted using a systematic search across four electronic databases (SCOPUS, Embase, Web of Science and Medline via PubMed), targeting studies published between 2019 and 2024. Eligible studies discussed strategies, barriers and facilitators for collaboration between researchers and policymakers in public health. Data were extracted on study context, collaboration mechanisms, enabling conditions and reported impacts.

A total of 24 studies were included, revealing four interdependent strategies for effective collaboration. Most notably, co-production of knowledge emerged in two distinct forms: as a deliberately structured intervention and as an emergent outcome of sustained engagement over time. This dual nature of co-production offers a critical lens for understanding how collaboration evolves in practice. Other key strategies included capacity building at both individual and organizational levels, the use of structured communication and feedback mechanisms to align research with policy needs, and the establishment of governance frameworks to institutionalize research–policy partnerships. Collaborations that were formalized, embedded within institutions, and maintained through iterative engagement were more likely to result in increased research uptake and enduring policy impact.

These findings underscore that structured collaboration, particularly when supported by institutional mechanisms, ongoing capacity building and iterative engagement, plays a critical role in increasing the use of research in public health policymaking. By distinguishing co-production as both a deliberate strategy and an emergent outcome, this review offers new insight into how collaborative models can be designed or evolved to strengthen evidence-informed decision-making.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12961-026-01443-y.

Figures