I was recently re-reading Cameron, Mishra & Brown’s 2015 landscape review of impact evaluation research, and realized that I hadn’t blogged about it previously. Obviously a few years out of date now, but it’s got some useful figures that I wanted to share. They reviewed 2200 studies from 1981 – 2012, finding that impact evaluations (both working papers and publications) grew rapidly after 2008.
Which countries are the subjects of impact evaluations? The Global South is clearly overrepresented here.
Where are these studies being published? The health sector accounts for as many impact evaluations as all other venues combined.
Which topics are most widely studied? Again, health remains the clear frontrunner here. I’m actually surprised that agriculture has so few evaluations, as I’ve always had the impression that it’s quite widely studied by social scientists.
Finally, where are the authors of these studies based? Unsurprisingly, most of them are from the Global North. This advantage actually appears to be increasing over time as well, which is worrying.
