How to do a good systematic review of effects in international development: a tool kit

Waddington, Hugh; White, Howard; Snilstveit, Birte; Hombrados, Jorge García; Vojtkova, Martina; Davies, Philip; Bhavsar, Ami; Eyers, John; Koehlmoos, Tracey Pérez; Petticrew, Mark; Valentine, Jeffrey C.; Tugwell, Peter

doi:10.1080/19439342.2012.711765

Cited by 202 publications

(207 citation statements)

References 69 publications

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“…Reviews of adaptation policy and practice are unlikely to lend themselves to standard approaches to systematic review, and as a result, there has been limited penetration and use of systematic approaches in adaptation research. This is despite ongoing and increasing calls for transparency of review methods, particularly within the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)'s Assessment Reports (Petticrew and McCartney 2011;Ford et al 2012c), and paralleled by calls in international development literature (Waddington et al 2012). New methodological tools to support evidence-based reviews of adaptation policy are sorely needed.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Given frequently fixed time and financial resources within a research team, there is an inevitable trade-off between depth and breadth (Gough et al 2012). A key difference is whether one takes a positivist (reductionist) approach to aggregated information or an interpretive, explanatory approach using realist methods (Barth and Thomas 2012;Gough et al 2012;Waddington et al 2012). The former may increase simplicity and presentation of results and the perception of objectivity, often preferable in informing evidence-based decision-making (Barth and Thomas 2012).…”

Section: Aim Of Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The term 'systematic review' was first coined within the social sciences (Glass 1976;Waddington et al 2012), but is predominantly used in current literature to refer to formal, strictly standardized review papers, primarily published in the health sciences. Fewer than 1 % of documents indexed in Web of Knowledge (218 of[60,000) with the title term 'systematic review,' for example, relate to research areas outside of the health or health-related sciences (Supplemental Materials, Search 1).…”

Section: Systematic Approaches To Research Synthesismentioning

confidence: 99%

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Systematic review approaches for climate change adaptation research

2015

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Recent controversy has led to calls for increased standardization and transparency in the methods used to synthesize climate change research. Though these debates have focused largely on the biophysical dimensions of climate change, human dimensions research is equally in need of improved methodological approaches for research synthesis. Systematic review approaches, and more recently realist review methods, have been used within the health sciences for decades to guide research synthesis. Despite this, penetration of these approaches into the social and environmental sciences has been limited. Here, we present an analysis of approaches for systematic review and research synthesis and examine their applicability in an adaptation context. Customized review frameworks informed by systematic approaches to research synthesis provide a conceptually appropriate and practical opportunity for increasing methodological transparency and rigor in synthesizing and tracking adaptation research. This review highlights innovative applications of systematic approaches, with a focus on the unique challenges of integrating multiple data sources and formats in reviewing climate change adaptation policy and practice. We present guidelines, key considerations, and recommendations for systematic review in the social sciences in general and adaptation research in particular. We conclude by calling for increased conceptual and methodological development of systematic review approaches to address the methodological challenges of synthesizing and tracking adaptation to climate change.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Aim Of Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Systematic Approaches To Research Synthesismentioning

confidence: 99%

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Systematic review approaches for climate change adaptation research

2015

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“…In efficacy assessment, they are used as a type of ''robustness analysis'': meta-analysis should confirm the (possibly conflicting) results of individual RCTs; instead concerning adverse events, they are explicitly used to detect risks for which individual RCTs are underpowered. Recent contributions to the methodology of systematic reviews also go in the direction to emphasising internal validity [46] by appropriately selecting studies, while obscuring the importance of other issues in evidence amalgamation, such as the combination of heterogeneous evidence for the purpose of ''connecting the dots'' between different constituents of a phenomenon.…”

Section: Limited Causal Information Of Rctsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Causal Assessment of Pharmaceutical Treatments: Why Standards of Evidence Should not be the Same for Benefits and Harms?

Osimani

Mignini

2014

Drug Saf

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It is increasingly acknowledged both among epidemiologists and regulators that the assessment of pharmaceutical harm requires specific methodological approaches that cannot simply duplicate those developed for testing efficacy. However, this intuition lacks sound epistemic bases and delivers ad hoc advice. This paper explains why the same methods of scientific inference do not fare equally well for efficacy and safety assessment by tracing them back to their epistemic foundations. To illustrate this, Cartwright's distinction into clinching and vouching methods is adopted and a series of reasons is provided for preferring the latter to the former: (1) the need to take into account all available knowledge and integrate it with incoming data; (2) the awareness that a latent unknown risk may always change the safety profile of a given drug (precautionary principle); (3) cumulative learning over time; (4) requirement of probabilistic causal assessment to allow decision under uncertainty; (5) impartiality; and (6) limited and local information provided by randomised controlled trials. Subsequently, the clinchers/vouchers distinction is applied to a case study concerning the debated causal association between paracetamol and asthma. This study illustrates the tension between implicit epistemologies adopted in evaluating evidence and causality; furthermore, it also shows that discounting causal evidence may be a result of unacknowledged low priors or lack of valid alternative options. We conclude with a presentation of the changing landscape in pharmacology and the trend towards an increased use of Bayesian tools for assessment of harms. Key PointsCausal assessment and scientific inference in pharmacology: inductivist approaches fare better than hypothetico-deductive ones when dealing with harms

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“…Due to the limitations of electronic searching 22,23,24 , we performed reference list searching, hand-searching relevant journals, and author-name searching in order to identify a comprehensive range of studies. Moreover, publications of key authors were searched for on the Plataforma Lattes website (http://lattes.cnpq.…”

Section: Search Strategy and Article Selectionmentioning

confidence: 99%