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Defining Research at the ADB

ADB's intellectual work combines the roles of advocacy, capacity building, and research. Each of these roles contributes in different ways to development thinking and debates in policy networks in and concerning developing member countries (DMCs).

However, the assessment of research products covers only research as defined in ADB. In particular, it includes basic and applied research.

It does not cover all other ADB knowledge products and services (KPS) and KPS by-products such as the following:

• education and training
• routine collection and publication of data and statistics (e.g., most of Asian Development Outlook and Key Indicators), unless data and statistics are collected for a specific research project
• feasibility studies, except when looking at feasibility of research
• op-ed and other articles in newspapers and popular magazines
• policy-related studies done in support of country operations

Based on the definitions in the Frascati Manual*, basic research is innovative, experimental or theoretical work to acquire new knowledge, without any particular application in view.

It starts with a relevant research question (e.g., what is the link between economic growth and poverty reduction?). In particular, the question

• needs to be worthy of study-- i.e., the answer isn't obvious, someone wants to know the answer, and an appropriate survey of prior, related work demonstrates that the question hasn't been adequately answered before
• may be in the form of a testable proposition, or hypothesis tested using quantitative and/or qualitative data, which may be a new data set or a new analysis of existing data (deductive method), or one may reason from specific observations and experiments, to possible generalizations and formulation of hypothesis and theories (inductive method)

Applied research is innovative, experimental or theoretical work to acquire new knowledge using the same scientific processes as with basic research, but directed towards a specific purpose such as developing a new policy or evaluating a program.

Thus, the study of the link between economic growth and poverty reduction becomes an applied research if the objective of the study was not merely to ask what the link is, but rather, to inform ADB and DMCs on policies to promote growth and poverty reduction.

For the purposes of the assessment, applied research covers the following:

• studies going beyond immediate ADB operational requirements, although this research may subsequently be taken into account in specific country operations and policy advice
• publication by ADB, ADB Institute (ADBI), or in an externally-published professional journal or book, addressing a testable research question, drawing from an appropriate range of sources and building on key findings from other researchers, and presenting a new data set or a new analysis of existing data