High-quality research is more likely to flourish within an environment and culture that is fair, inclusive and supportive. Such a culture is shaped, in part, by the decisions and actions taken within research organisations.

The COMET project will improve decision-making within institutions, by promoting and facilitating evidence-informed practice, to promote research excellence.

This will be achieved by producing a body of evidence demonstrating how decisions are currently made, after undertaking a rigorous study with a sample of UK Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), and by co-designing practical outputs with stakeholders to support institutions improve their decision-making by basing those decisions on better evidence.

The project has ethics approval from the University of Bristol (22506).

We’ve been carrying out interviews with individuals across both academic and professional services. By digging into how decisions are made at different organisational levels, we’re highlighting what’s working well, and what challenges and obstacles institutions face when trying to put evidence-informed practices into action.

With most of our interviews now complete, our early thematic analyses indicate that meta-research evidence is not widely used by institutions making decisions about research culture, despite their role as producers of evidence. We recognise barriers on both the producer and user sides of meta-research, and will explore both as our analyses progress.