International Research Network on Valuing Health Research

一段时间以来，研究人员一直对健康研究的价值感兴趣：既有生物医学过程的基础研究，也有关注健康和老龄化的行为/社会研究。然而，估计医学研究的价值一直很困难。数据的局限性使研究具有挑战性，学科之间或学科内部可能对采用适当的理论和方法框架存在分歧，很少有研究人员在相关领域拥有足够广泛的背景来进行必要的应用研究。我们建议组织一个主要由美国和英国的研究人员组成的网络，这些研究人员对健康研究的影响和设计感兴趣，定期收集这些研究人员，并鼓励他们对健康研究的价值进行新的研究。我们将聚集来自不同背景的人，包括经济学的许多子学科以及流行病学，医学研究和其他社会科学。该小组将在美国国家经济研究局和联合王国财政研究所的主持下联合组织。项目活动将包括研究网络的定期聚会;为高风险、跨学科项目提供种子赠款，特别是面向年轻研究人员的项目;以及向网络内外的研究人员开放的教育活动。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): For some time, researchers have been interested in the value of health research: both basic research on biomedical processes and behavioral/social research focused on health and aging. Estimating the value of medical research has been difficult, however. Data limitations make research challenging, there can be disagreement across or within disciplines on the appropriate theoretical and methodological frameworks to adopt, and few researchers have a broad enough background across the relevant areas to conduct the necessary applied research. We propose to organize a network of primarily US and UK-based researchers who are interested in the impact and design of health research, to gather this group regularly, and to stimulate new research on the value of health research from that group and related others. We will gather people from diverse backgrounds, including many sub disciplines of economics as well as epidemiology, medical research, and other social sciences. The group will be jointly organized under the auspices of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) in the United States and the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) in the United Kingdom. Project activities will consist of regular gatherings of the research network; seed grants for high risk, interdisciplinary projects, especially oriented to younger researchers; and educational activities open to researchers inside and outside of the network.