Research or evaluation? Does it matter?

The article discusses the use of wide-ranging research initiatives or smaller research projects to generate evidence regarding the practices of library and information services in health fields. The author compares definitions of evidence in library science to those of healthcare and suggests social care provides a model of user-focused service evaluation that can provide evidence in library science. Distinctions between research and evaluation in the British National Health Service are noted. The author comments that evaluation-based efforts can lead to projects lacking a hypothesis and changes in the form of statistics used.