This article is a response to Oliver et al.'s Commentary 'The dark side of coproduction: do the costs outweigh the benefits for health research?' recently published in Health Research Policy and Systems (2019, 17:33). The original commentary raises some important questions about how and when to co-produce health research, including highlighting various professional costs to those involved. However, we identify four related limitations in their inquiry, as follows: (1) the adoption of a problematically expansive definition of co-production that fails to acknowledge key features that distinguish co-production from broader collaboration; (2) a strong focus on technocratic rationales for co-producing research and a relative neglect of democratic rationales; (3) the transposition of legitimate concerns relating to collaboration between researchers and practitioners onto work with patients, service users and marginalised citizens; and (4) the presentation of bad practice as an inherent flaw, or indeed 'dark side', of co-production without attending to the corrupting influence of contextual factors within academic research that facilitate and even promote such malpractice. The Commentary's limitations can be seen to reflect the contemporary use of the term 'co-production' more broadly. We describe this phenomenon as 'cobiquity'an apparent appetite for participatory research practice and increased emphasis on partnership working, in combination with the related emergence of a plethora of 'co' words, promoting a conflation of meanings and practices from different collaborative traditions. This phenomenon commonly leads to a misappropriation of the term 'co-production'. Our main motivation is to address this imprecision and the detrimental impact it has on efforts to enable co-production with marginalised and disadvantaged groups. We conclude that Oliver et al. stray too close to 'the problem' of 'co-production' seeing only the dark side rather than what is casting the shadows. We warn against such a restricted view and argue for greater scrutiny of the structural factors that largely explain academia's failure to accommodate and promote the egalitarian and utilitarian potential of co-produced research.

This article explores the progressive and regressive potential of`user involvement' in research and evaluation, with particular reference to social policy. There is growing political and research interest in user involvement. This article critically explores key different approaches to user involvement in research and relates them to consumerist and democratic models of involvement in policy and practice, management and development. The article highlights the need to approach user involvement in research critically and systematically, taking account of the diversity of approaches that have developed and to take forward user involvement in research in equal association with service user organisations and movements.

Background Service user involvement is embedded in the United KingdomÕs National Health Service, but knowledge about the impact of involvement on service users, such as the benefits and challenges of involvement, is scant. Our research addresses this gap.

While patient and public involvement (PPI) in health and social care research has progressed successfully in the last decade, a range of difficulties with the evidence base exist, including poor understanding of the concept of impact, limited theorization and an absence of quantitative impact measurement. In this paper, we argue that a paradigm change towards robust measurement of the impact of involvement in research is needed to complement qualitative explorations. We argue that service users should be collaboratively involved in the conceptualization, theorization and development of instruments to measure PPI impact. We consider the key advantages measurement would bring in strengthening the PPI evidence base through a greater understanding of what works, for whom, in what circumstances and why.

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