Changing the world one systematic review at a time: A new development methodology for making a difference

This paper presents a methodology that is increasingly being adopted in international development, namely systematic review. It starts from the premise that rigorous and structured systematic reviews of research evidence have the potential to ‘change the world’ by providing accurate comprehensive summaries of knowledge for decision-makers, and goes on to outline the key processes involved in conducting these reviews. It outlines the methodology in terms of the key research stages of: establishing your review question, collecting data, analysis, reflecting on the strengths of your methods, and drawing conclusions. In doing so, it lays down a challenge to development researchers, to engage with the approach and improve the rigour of our literature reviews.