Kerman University of Medical Sciences International Journal of Health Policy and Management 2322-5939 7 4 2018 04 01 Making Research Matter; Comment on “Public Spending on Health Service and Policy Research in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States: A Modest Proposal” 353 355 3403 10.15171/ijhpm.2017.97 EN David J. Hunter Institute of Health and Society, Newcastle University, Newcastle, UK 0000-0002-7085-8729 John Frank Usher Institute of Population Health Sciences and Informatics, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK 0000-0003-3912-4214 Journal Article 2017 06 28 We offer a UK-based commentary on the recent “Perspective” published in <em>IJHPM</em> by Thakkar and Sullivan. We are sympathetic to the authors’ call for increased funding for health service and policy research (HSPR). However, we point out that increasing that investment – in any of the three countries they compare: Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom– will ipso facto not necessarily lead to any better use of research by health system decision-makers in these settings. We cite previous authors’ descriptions of the many factors that tend to make the worlds of researchers and decision-makers into “two solitudes.” And we call for changes in the structure and funding of HSPR, particularly the incentives now in place for purely academic publishing, to tackle a widespread reality: most published research in HSPR, as in other applied fields of science, is never read or used by the vast majority of decision-makers, working out in the “real world.” https://www.ijhpm.com/article_3403_898dd88cca7b2f65461bc491dacb9b25.pdf