Building upon its highly successful weekly Research Brief program, an initiative designed to catalogue, summarize and disseminate peer-reviewed, academic research focused on issues and topics impacting veterans and military families, the Institute for Veterans and Military Families at Syracuse University (IVMF) has announced the expansion of this effort to include in-progress research. In-progress research is characterized as scholarship that has been presented to the academic and/or practitioner community in the form of working papers or conference presentations that has yet to complete the formal peer-review and publication process.
Examples of in-progress research include working papers, dissertations, institute/think-tank publications, government reports, non-governmental publications, books and research presented at academic conferences and symposia. Other examples may include early-stage research that is preliminary or exploratory, and may be of interest to the veteran stakeholder community. The expansion of the IVMF Research Brief program to include in-progress research provides a platform for scholars to promote awareness of ongoing research relevant to veterans and military families in a pre-publication form, and also to help connect possibly disparate groups of researchers focused on these important issues.
“The peer review and publication process is central to ensuring the quality and academic rigor of scholarly research; however in many academic disciplines that process can often extend to several years,” says Mike Haynie, IVMF executive director and founder. “The expansion of the IVMF Research Brief program to include in-progress research represents an acknowledgment that the issues and challenges impacting many of the nation’s veterans and military families are real, compelling and immediate, and if there is an opportunity for in-progress research to be applied, in a careful and measured way, to inform current policy and practice focused on the social and economic challenges facing our nation’s veterans, we should seize that opportunity.”
The ongoing mission of the IVMF Research Brief program is to concisely summarize and bring awareness to academic research, relevant to stakeholders in the veteran community. IVMF Research Briefs are catalogued on the institute website and can be downloaded without cost by veterans, military families, policy makers, employers, researchers, grant makers and other stakeholders in the veteran community. To reflect the expansion of the program to include in-progress reach, a “publication type” will be included in all forthcoming Research Briefs. Publication type will also be used as a category when searching and sorting Research Briefs on the IVMF site.
Scholars or organizations may submit their research for consideration to be issued as an IVMF Research Brief by contacting Rosalinda Maury, IVMF director of research, at 315-443-0172 or rvmaury@syr.edu, or through the online submission form.
