In the UK there is currently a national consultation on the structure/adoption of an academic credit framework for higher education. The purpose of this paper is to argue that the principles underlying such a framework, when applied in the context of a workplace research project, can facilitate debate between the academic disciplines and work-based learning practitioners.

This paper is a report of a discussion of the arguments surrounding the role of the initial literature review in grounded theory.

This paper is a report of a study to evaluate the use of an online data collection method to survey early survivors of childhood cancer about their physical and psychosocial characteristics and health-related quality of life.

The authors discuss some of the practical problems faced by researchers undertaking reviews of complex and cross-disciplinary topics, using the example of mental health and social exclusion. The barriers to carrying out social science and cross-disciplinary reviews are reported and some proposals for overcoming these barriers are made, not all of them tried and tested, and some of them controversial.

How is knowledge constructed in systematic reviews and meta-analysis in healthcare? Drawing on ethnographic data collected during 18 months of fieldwork in a research centre devoted to the development of evidence-based clinical-practice guidelines and systematic reviews, the paper argues that knowledge construction in secondary research in healthcare is structured upon a parallel process of disentanglement and qualification of data.

Systematic reviews (SRs) have become increasingly popular to a wide range of stakeholders. The authors set out to capture a representative cross-sectional sample of published SRs and examine them in terms of a broad range of epidemiological, descriptive, and reporting characteristics. One conclusion was that there were large differences between Cochrane and non-Cochrane reviews.

The authors evaluated the conclusions from Cochrane systematic reviews of randomized controlled trials in terms of their recommendations for clinical practice and research. They concluded that the Cochrane Collaboration needs to include clinical trial protocol summaries with a study design optimized to answer the relevant research questions.

This paper explores factors that impinge on the “insider-researcher” (IR) when undertaking a work-based learning project. Themes of benefits and constraints identified the organisation, the clients and co-workers and the IR benefiting from work-based projects. The position and personal attributes of the IR may be a constraint. Of major consideration are ethical issues arising from the project process. Academics' concerns include student supervision, the impact on the IR, and factors affecting change and project processes.