Communication is a two-way street: Analyzing practices undertaken to systematically transfer audit research knowledge to policymakers
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Audit academics and policymakers express ongoing concerns about limited knowledge transfer between audit research and policymaking. We use theory-based knowledge transfer norms to evaluate eight practices used by audit academics to transfer research knowledge to policymakers. The discontinued PCAOB-AAA Auditing Section “Research Synthesis Project” came closest to enacting these theory-based knowledge transfer norms. Hence, we examine why those involved in that project did not follow these norms. Interviews with project authors reveal that their review creation approach anchored on the traditional academic literature review, and insufficiently adjusted it to meet the goal of communicating audit research evidence to policymakers. However, interviews with PCAOB project liaisons indicate that policymakers were engaged with and found value in the review creation process. Thus, we analyze PCAOB rulemaking documents for evidence that policymakers valued and used the project’s reviews in their policymaking. Over the project’s duration, we find increasing citations of research to the reviews themselves and to a broader set of academic research. Our findings of knowledge transfer occurrence in this project warrant further research on the efficacy of mobilizing audit research via research syntheses. We also show how several current audit domain knowledge transfer practices can be combined with the research syntheses approach leading to systematic effective knowledge transfer to policymakers.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it