A team of researchers have compiled a comprehensive library of research papers and reported studies related to meat and animal product reduction interventions. How might you use it in your own work?
What is in the research library and how to access it?
The research library was developed by Ben Stevenson, Jacob Peacock, Julia Fabienne Sandkühler, Jessica Hope, Constanza Arévalo, Joanna Anderson, and Maya Mathur (hereon, Stevenson et al., 2025).
It contains 413 sources published before April 16, 2024. Sources included in the library span published academic papers but also grey literature such as studies from nonprofits and NGOs. The library spreadsheet and codebook can be accessed on Open Science Framework here: https://osf.io/dnu58/overview
Each row of the spreadsheet contains bibliographic data (e.g., title, abstract, etc.) for each source, including DOIs and Urls for easy retrieval.
How was it generated? What makes it unique?
See Rethink Priorities’ full report regarding how the resource was developed, such as which inclusion and exclusion criteria were applied within their review of the literature and how the sources were screened.
One of the aims of this library was to take a more inclusive approach to study inclusion than in past literature reviews of meat-eating intervention studies. The Stevenson et al. (2025) database includes studies aimed at assessing interventions for reducing animal-product consumption that involve: (a) studies inside and outside of academia, (b) measures of attitudes, intentions and behaviours toward meat and other edible animal products (e.g., eggs, fish, shrimp), and (c) research that quantifies consumer change in meaningful ways, not necessarily limited to randomised control designs – see full report for details.
This broader scope makes the Stevenson et al. (2025) resource different from other, existing research libraries, such as the Library of Interventions for Meat Elimination (LIME; Sleegers et al., 2025), which limits its scope to randomised controlled studies (105 sources, as of today). (The LIME database focuses on experimental studies that use behavioural or non-behavioural measures of meat and animal product consumption.)
What can I do with it?
Rethink Priorities envisions a number of uses for the resource, including facilitating more targeted reviews focused on different subsets of studies within the database. Jacob Peacock wrote to us: “The literature on educational interventions in classroom contexts, increasing the availability of plant-based foods, and comparing different messaging strategies like health vs. environmental concerns, are all over-due for reviews.”
At the moment, the library is set up primarily for article retrieval. The library does not yet include analytical tools for extracting key study information from each source (e.g., information about samples, interventions, outcomes, effects). However, this is something that could be developed in the future – much like the analytical tools developed for the LIME data resource (see the LIME Data Explorer and Meta-analysis tools).
For more information about the research library, how it might be used or further developed, please contact Jacob Peacock by email: jpeacock29@gmail.com and check out Rethink Priorities’ post about here.
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