Study context: the COVID-19 pandemic, misinformation, and politics
In 2020, the world was gripped by the COVID-19 pandemic, which not only disrupted the normal social order (e.g., “work from home”), but also altered the public’s degree of exposure to and engagement with scientific research. The intense need for supporting the rapid uptake of high-quality research evidence encouraged responses from the scientific community. Even before the pandemic, there were significant concerns among the scientific community that a “war on science” was politicizing and delegitimizing public perception of scientific credibility [Mutual mistrust and a lack of scaffolded opportunities to facilitate interactions between academic researchers and policymakers are prominent barriers to URE [