What have we learned from the application of systematic review methodology in international development? – a thematic overview

Abstract

The importance of systematic review evidence in the design and implementation of policies and interventions is increasingly recognised in the field of international development. This article presents a stocktake of the primary years of systematic reviewing in international development, providing a thematic overview of what we have learned about conducting international development reviews. Applying a structured methodology to search for and categorise all relevant literature, it establishes that systematic reviews have been well received in international development and serve as a useful tool for evidenceinformed development, which has led to important discoveries in the domain.

Sport for development – a systematic map of evidence from Africa

“…Social and political contexts influence the development process, and evaluating impacts therefore needs to be based on a variety of different evaluation designs. Evidence-informed development is thus clear about the equal standing of quantitative and qualitative definitions of evidence, highlighting the importance of local knowledge, perceptions, contexts, and mechanisms (Bamberger, Rao and Woolock 2010;Langer and Stewart 2014). In this context, there might be little justification for sportfor-development's exceptional role as an 'evidence-free' development intervention.…”

Financing entrepreneurship by risk capital - evidence revisited

“…This study employs a modified classification matrix of the research methods used in the study of risk capital to categorise the current research and identify research gaps (Behzadian et al, 2010;Langer and Stewart, 2014). Methodologically, the approach of developing a classification matrix has been implemented in several literature reviews (e.g.…”

Which standards from which disciplines? A test of systematic review for designing interdisciplinary evaluations

“…The expanding range of domains in which SR is applied and its suitability for working from a broad literature commended it to our use. However, while SRs are increasingly used in the field of development to aggregate knowledge of interventions (Guerrero et al 2013;Langer and Stewart 2014;Leroy, Gadsden, and Guijarro 2012;Mallett et al 2012), to our knowledge, the relevance of SR to the generation of methodological prescriptions for interdisciplinary research is a novel and as yet untested area of application and we did expect challenges. Even in domains where SR is common, it is still usually used to review evidence generated from studies with commensurable theory and methods.…”

“…2012). In the social sciences, SRs are now also used to make sense of and manage the 'information explosion', separate wheat from the chaff, identify gaps in an evidence base, confirm, refute, develop or modify bodies of theory, and increase the standard of research in the field (Bondas and Hall 2007;Campbell et al 2003;Langer and Stewart 2014;Major and SavinBaden. 2012;Noblit and Hare 1988;Wallace et al 2004;White and Waddington 2012).…”