NEAL ROBERT HADDAWAY, Research Fellow, Africa Centre for Evidence, University of Johannesburg RESEARCHERS regularly review the literature that’s generated by others in their field. This is an integral part of day-to-day research: finding relevant research, reading and digesting the main findings, summarising across papers, and making conclusions about the evidence base as a whole. However, there is a fundamental difference between brief, narrative approaches to summarising a selection of studies and attempting to reliably, comprehensively summarise an evidence base to support decision-making in policy and practice. So-called “evidence-informed decision-making” relies on rigorous systematic approaches to synthesising the evidence. Systematic review…