Making sure research is used: community-generated recommendations for disseminating research

Academic research, no matter how innovative, will never make a difference in the lives of people unless it is disseminated in an appropriate and timely manner to providers and organizations serving the public. Yet many researchers are not trained, rewarded, or supported to disseminate research findings. The Community Advisory Board (CAB) of the University of California, San Francisco, Center for AIDS Prevention Studies (CAPS) developed a set guidelines to support researchers' intentions to disseminate their findings through nontraditional venues. These guidelines are unique because community members, many of whom have struggled with accessing research in a timely way, generated them. In addition to developing the guidelines, the CAB also conceived and implemented a dissemination strategy for the guidelines. The purpose of this article is to present specific guidelines for disseminating research developed by the CAPS CAB.