Pragmatic evidence synthesis: Protocol for project-specific evidence searching and reporting

The Well North internal evaluation team at the University of Manchester (UoM) are engaged in evaluating several distinct community projects as they emerge and evolve. As such there is an ongoing requirement for robust, though sometimes rapid, literature searching and reporting on the current and supporting evidence-base. This protocol intends to provide an outline of the process of tracking and developing this process and its outcomes.
The term that we have adopted, Pragmatic Evidence Synthesis, is one that we feel describes the best practice that we aim to apply to the process of gathering evidence to inform the evaluation given the time and resources at our disposal. . It is also reflective of the iterative process in that projects may start with one idea of what they are going to embark on but then find that they change their focus in some respect. There is a plethora of literature that variously describe Evidence Synthesis, Rapid Evidence Synthesis and Scoping Studies but currently there is no clear consensus on what each of these terms mean. 1-4 They do all, however, draw on the various strategies encompassed within the conduct and execution of a classic SR. For the purposes of optimising publication in peer reviewed journals, the best bet is still to aim for something that we can describe as a systematic review, comply with the PRISMA checklist and be prepared to fight it out with the reviewers after submission and/or slide down the impact factor ladder.