Independent report
Evaluation of DFID Online Research Portals and Repositories
This evaluation focusses on 3 portals and repositories supported by DFID: Eldis, R4D, SciDev.Net.
Documents
Details
The evaluation comprised 3 primary methods:
- market research in the form of a global online questionnaire
- three country case studies in Ghana
- Tanzania and Nigeria consisting of interviews, contextual inquiry, a diary study and a heuristic evaluation
- a value for money assessment of Eldis and SciDev.Net
The evaluation found that the portals’ ‘Intended Users’ research evidence-seeking online is frequent, rapid and impatient: Intended Users frequently referred to their lack of time to devote to searching; they also rarely went beyond the first page of results in Google. Although there are some sceptics, Google gets results: Intended Users cited it as more efficient and often more effective than the DFID-funded portals’ own internal search functions.
Published 27 October 2016
Last updated 10 February 2017 + show all updates
Last updated 10 February 2017 + show all updates
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Management response added.
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First published.