ABSTRACT
As this chapter has shown, systematic reviews provide one way of bringing together accumulating evidence in an explicit manner. The extended examples in this book taken from the first reviews of the EPPI-Centre’s English Review Group reveal one model of this approach. The approach to research synthesis used by this and other Review Groups has been the subject of criticism, mainly by educational researchers in the UK, in the early years of the EPPI-Centre. As the overview at the start of this chapter points out, many appear to have been based on misunderstandings of systematic review methods or are criticisms more of poor application of these methods, rather than of the methods themselves; however, many challenges remain.
