By Neal R. Haddaway and Martin J. Westgate
Evidence synthesis is a vital part of evidence-informed decision-making, but the seemingly exponential growth in the volume of research evidence over the last few decades will make efficient evidence synthesis increasingly challenging because of the necessary workloads.
As the appreciation and need for timely and rigorous evidence synthesis continue to grow, so too will the need for tools and frameworks to conduct reviews of expanding evidence bases in an efficient and time-sensitive manner. Unfortunately, efforts to future-proof evidence synthesis through such Evidence Synthesis Technology (ESTech) have too often been isolated across interested individuals or groups, with little concerted effort to collaborate or build communities of practice in technology production.
The Campbell Collaboration has a vital role to play in raising awareness and capacity for ESTech developments that could increase rigour, efficiency and legacy of its systematic reviews. Representatives from Campbell are involved in a variety of ESTech efforts: Ciara Keenan (Campbell UK and Ireland), Emily Hennessy (International Development Coordinating Group) and Neal Haddaway (Co-chair Climate Solutions CG) organised the highly successful Evidence Synthesis and Meta-Analysis in R conference (ESMARConf2021) in January; Wolfgang Viechtbauer (Methods Editor for the Climate Solutions CG) is the author of the popular metafor meta-analysis package in R.
We established the Evidence Synthesis Hackathon to stimulate collaboration and the production of free and open source software and frameworks to support evidence synthesis.
We are excited to introduce a special series of papers on ESTech that will be published through a unique partnership between Campbell and the Collaboration for Environmental Evidence. We invite all interested researchers working in the field to submit manuscripts introducing and validating novel evidence synthesis tools and frameworks. We hope this collection will help to consolidate ESTech development efforts and encourage readers to join the ESTech revolution.
In order to future-proof evidence synthesis against the evidence avalanche, we believe that we must spark interest in ESTech, reduce redundancy in tool design, collaborate and share capacity in tool production, and reduce inequality in tool accessibility.
We welcome the submission of commentaries, methodology papers, and research articles that describe issues related to ESTech, or that introduce and validate novel frameworks, tools and techniques to support efficient and rigorous evidence synthesis. We hope the collection will support discussion between researchers, developers and users.
For this special series, we want to hear about technologies that fill a real gap: i.e., papers that introduce a new tool that did not previously exist; or, make an existing tool much easier to use or make it available to a new audience.
Critically, we are interested in technologies that are broadly accessible, as appropriate for the tool in question: i.e. they should pass standard checks to ensure they work across a range of operating systems or computational contexts; they must be free-to-use (or means-based, e.g. free for low- and middle-income country users) and preferably open source.
All submissions that meet these criteria will be considered, regardless of whether they include software or research from ESH events. Moreover, while many within the evidence synthesis community already share some or all of the goals that we have discussed, we call on the readers of Environmental Evidence to embrace ESTech and these ideals and goals in their future work.
Authors interested in proposing papers should contact us using the form on our dedicated webpage: https://estechseries.github.io/.
About the authors
Neal Haddaway is a Senior Research Fellow at the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), a Senior Researcher at the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change, and a Research Associate at the Africa Centre for Evidence. His background is in conservation and environmental management, but since 2012 he has been helping to develop evidence synthesis methodology across disciplines. Neal is the co-founder of the Evidence Synthesis Hackathon and the new Evidence Synthesis and Meta-Analysis in R Conference (ESMARConf). Neal is the Centre Leader for the Collaboration for Environmental Evidence (CEE) Centre at SEI and the Co-Chair of the Campbell Collaboration Climate Solutions Coordinating Group.
Martin Westgate is science advisor to the Atlas of Living Australia and a visiting fellow at the Fenner School of Environment & Society at the Australian National University. His research focuses on how scientific information can be used to understand and mitigate human impacts on the environment, via a combination of empirical ecology and evidence synthesis. Martin is the co-founder of the Evidence Synthesis Hackathon and the new Evidence Synthesis and Meta-Analysis in R Conference (ESMARConf). Martin is also a scientific software developer and occasional frog-watcher.