he United Nations' 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are guideposts for an international community that aspires to achieve a better life for all people. For example, SDG 2 seeks to achieve zero hunger by 2030. This requires ensuring that the world is food secure while at the same time preserving the environment for future use far beyond 2030. Solutions to development problems are rooted in domain-specific knowledge such as agriculture and livelihoods, environment and natural resource management, nutrition and health, human capital and education. Policy and funding organizations need a synthesis of scientific information to inform their decision-making 1-3. But it is difficult to synthesize the world's accumulated scientific knowledge for complex issues like food security, because these solutions are spread across millions of individual studies, and the breadth and depth of human research is estimated to double every nine years 4. Moreover, the questions of policy actors are substantially different from the questions that researchers are trained to answer. Evidence-informed decision-making rose as a means to fill the gaps between research and policy 5,6. Systematic and scoping reviews, evidence gap maps, and meta-analyses all fall under the broad umbrella of evidence synthesis and provide a model under which policy and intervention examinations can be made with greater focus, reliability and transparency 6. In recent years researchers in education, international development, economics and ecology have adapted these methodologies-originally designed by the health and medical communities to evaluate claims presented in clinical trials-in order to introduce more standardized approaches to examine their own growing evidence bases 7,8. Producing evidence syntheses are time-consuming. A single evidence synthesis takes a research team anywhere from 18 months to three years and involves an initial analysis of thousands of search results to determine which are capable of supporting evaluation of the original research question 9,10. This frustrates policy's demand-driven cycle, wherein answers are needed now in order to make decisions about resource allocation.
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