Abstract
As a methodology designed to inform policy and practice decisions, it is particularly important to ensure that systematic
reviews are shaped by those who will use them. There is a broad range of approaches for engagement of the
potential users of reviews that aim to elicit their priorities and needs and incorporate these into the review design.
This incorporation of their priorities and needs can create a tension between their calls for locally-specific, often
rapidly-produced evidence syntheses for policy needs and the production of unbiased, generalisable, globally-relevant
systematic reviews. This tension raises the question of what is a ‘gold standard’ review. This commentary aims to
address head on this often undiscussed key challenge with regard to stakeholder involvement in systematic reviews:
that responding to stakeholders can mean reconsidering what makes a review rigorous. The commentary proposes a
new model to address these tensions that combines the production of public-good reviews, with stakeholder-driven
syntheses. In this, it presents the approach taken by our team in [Anonymised] to achieve two different but complementary
outputs: (i) ‘public goods’, namely comprehensive and generalisable systematic reviews of the evidence
available for and accessible to a global audience, and (ii) locally-focussed, stakeholder-driven, pragmatically-produced
syntheses for decision-making at a policy level. The designed approach incorporates balancing the formal requirements
of full, published systematic reviews with engagement of national and international decision-makers. It also
accommodates space to move from stakeholder engagement to co-production, where stakeholders are engaged to
such an extent that they become partners in the production of the review. These approaches are integrated into the
traditional steps for producing a systematic review with implications as to what constitutes a gold standard approach
to synthesising evidence.