Abstract
Reflecting on my role as the newly appointed Editor in Chief of the Campbell Collaboration and its future, I was reminded of our family’s black walnut tree (Juglans nigra), a gift on the birth of our third child from our arborist neighbor. Our tree is only 8 years old, 16 ft. tall and has not borne any fruit at all, since the black walnut tree takes about 15 years before producing fruit. Yet, one day this tree will stand up to 100 ft. tall due to its streamlined growth and strong root foundation. It will then produce a copious yield of sought-after and beautifully fragrant black walnuts.
Similar to our black walnut tree, the Campbell Collaboration, an organization dedicated to evidence synthesis to inform social policy, has grown organically from only 80 members at its inaugural meeting in 2001 (Petrosino, Boruch, Soydan, Duggan, & Sanchez-Meca, 2001) to 5,639 members in 89 countries today, with a strong root system based on high-quality methods and ethical publishing practices. The Campbell Collaboration started with only four main groups (methods, social welfare, education, and crime and justice). As these branches grew, additional branches developed in specialized areas. For example, the disability group branched off from the education group. In addition, two new groups on international development and knowledge translation and implementation were started and two are being explored on food security and business and management to respond to emerging policy challenges (Littell & White, 2017). Some topics are very broad and may support further division. For example, the international development group has developed a subgroup on nutrition.
The Campbell Collaboration will continue to provide the fertile conditions needed for its growth across four foundational pillars: people, ideas, processes, and alliances. People are the greatest asset of any organization. The Campbell Collaboration is taking an inclusive person-centered approach to ensuring all of our contributors feel valued. For example, we have established regular virtual meetings to provide professional development in editorial processes, including commitment to train and mentor new editors, consistent with the best practices in journal policies (Moher et al., 2017). These capacity-enhancing activities are designed to facilitate remote contribution, supporting members from around the world as well as those with personal life commitments. As another example, we will publicly acknowledge the contributions of peer referees. Furthermore, our training strategy is designed to welcome new contributors by providing sequential training to meet the needs at each stage of conducting evidence synthesis. People also include our end users such as practitioners and decision makers who need accessible, policy-friendly summaries. All Campbell Collaboration activities need to consider how best to keep all contributors engaged.
Ideas represent our vision to inform social policy with rigorous evidence synthesis. Our strategy document is a united vision of how we plan to build capacity for increased production of policy-relevant reviews that we are convinced will lead to better policies and a better world (Campbell Collaboration, 2016). All activities are directed at this common vision.
Processes and structures to support our vision are focused on our person-centered approach. We have adopted a state of the art information management system which will help us streamline our editorial process and minimize burden on our editorial teams. Open access has always been central to the Campbell Collaboration’s values. Building on this commitment, we are seeking an online publishing platform for our growing library that will facilitate open data as well as open access. We have requested a journal impact factor and will enable article-level metrics. We are developing processes to welcome new authors, editors, groups, and training centers as well as support methods innovation. To support new evidence synthesis types, we have developed a Campbell Collaboration innovations series which promotes testing of methods such as evidence gap maps (Sniltsveit, Vojtkova, Bhavsar, Stevenson & Gaardner 2016; Miller, Ordonez, Baylis, Hughes, & Rana, 2017) and reviews of reviews. To reflect on the strengths and limitations of systematic review methods, we are publishing methods reviews (such as a review of publication bias by Gupta, Waddington, Adona, Rothstein, & White, 2017). All processes are rooted in the values of the Campbell Collaboration to protect academic rigor and transparency, invite open and constructive feedback, and uphold publication ethics.
Strategic alliances with external partners are critical to achieve our desired impact on policy. For example, we are fortunate to have a close relationship with Research on Social Work Practice, with articles about our vision and resources (Polanin & Pigott 2012; Schuerman et al., 2002) and a recent series (Maynard, Littell, & Shlonsky, 2018) with a paper on the impact of the Campbell Collaboration (Maynard & Dell 2018) and papers presenting findings from six Campbell Collaboration systematic reviews. We will continue to actively seek and nurture partnerships with decision makers, evidence portals, and observatories and evidence intermediaries to package and disseminate our evidence syntheses. Linguistic accessibility is as important as open access, and we have begun to translate our plain language summaries into Spanish, Chinese, French and other languages, with help from our valued partners. In addition, we are planning to develop more Campbell Collaboration centers, such as our first centre: the Campbell UK and Ireland Centre at Queen’s University Belfast which will lead training and dissemination efforts nationally.
To date, the Campbell Collaboration has published only 145 systematic reviews. As with the black walnut tree, the Campbell Collaboration, now 16 years old with an established root and trunk foundation, is on the verge of exponential production due to attention from its champions in tending it and contributions of its many members and partners. I and all Campbell Collaboration members are grateful to all who have contributed and are continuing to contribute to the Campbell Collaboration's growth.
In these exciting times ahead, we are convening at the Global Evidence and Implementation
Summit 2018 in Melbourne, Australia, from October 22 to 24, 2018. Please join us! It
will be great to witness the explosions of fruits of the organization. But, don’t wait
until then to contact me: You can reach me directly at
