RAMESES publication standards: meta-narrative reviews

By G. Wong, Trisha Greenhalgh, G. Westhorp, J. Buckingham, R. Pawson. BMC Medicine, 2013

621 citations recorded by the source corpus.

BackgroundMeta-narrative review is one of an emerging menu of new approaches to qualitative and mixed-method systematic review. A meta-narrative review seeks to illuminate a heterogeneous topic area by highlighting the contrasting and complementary ways in which researchers have studied the same or a similar topic. No previous publication standards exist for the reporting of meta-narrative reviews. This publication standard was developed as part of the RAMESES (Realist And MEta-narrative Evidence Syntheses: Evolving Standards) project. The project's aim is to produce preliminary publication standards for meta-narrative reviews.MethodsWe (a) collated and summarized existing literature on the principles of good practice in meta-narrative reviews; (b) considered the extent to which these principles had been followed by published reviews, thereby identifying how rigor may be lost and how existing methods could be improved; (c) used a three-round online Delphi method with an interdisciplinary panel of national and international experts in evidence synthesis, meta-narrative reviews, policy and/or publishing to produce and iteratively refine a draft set of methodological steps and publication standards; (d) provided real-time support to ongoing meta-narrative reviews and the open-access RAMESES online discussion list so as to capture problems and questions as they arose; and (e) synthesized expert input, evidence review and real-time problem analysis into a definitive set of standards.ResultsWe identified nine published meta-narrative reviews, provided real-time support to four ongoing reviews and captured questions raised in the RAMESES discussion list. Through analysis and discussion within the project team, we summarized the published literature, and common questions and challenges into briefing materials for the Delphi panel, comprising 33 members. Within three rounds this panel had reached consensus on 20 key publication standards, with an overall response rate of 90%.ConclusionThis project used multiple sources to draw together evidence and expertise in meta-narrative reviews. For each item we have included an explanation for why it is important and guidance on how it might be reported. Meta-narrative review is a relatively new method for evidence synthesis and as experience and methodological developments occur, we anticipate that these standards will evolve to reflect further theoretical and methodological developments. We hope that these standards will act as a resource that will contribute to improving the reporting of meta-narrative reviews.To encourage dissemination of the RAMESES publication standards, this article is co-published in the Journal of Advanced Nursing and is freely accessible on Wiley Online Library (http://www.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/jan). Please see related article http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/11/21 and http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/11/22

Subfields: General Health Professions, Sociology and Political Science, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fbd3b28f012872f532c17dc5980a99ab47f4f43e

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Citations in the corpus

Fostering Graduate Employability: Rethinking Tanzania’s University Practices (2021, methodology): “Based on the aim of this study, a semi-systematic or narrative review approach was used, because this method was expected to help identify theoretically pertinent university practices with implications for graduate employability and integrate these practices through meta-narratives as an alternative”
Patient engagement in research: a systematic review (2014, background): “This approach was developed as a pragmatic solution to study topics that have been differently conceptualized and studied by different groups of researchers [15].”
Time to challenge the spurious hierarchy of systematic over narrative reviews? (2018, background): “A meta-narrative review maps the storyline of a research tradition over time.(28) Shifting the focus away from comparing findings of studies published at different times, it orients critical reflection to discern how ideas have waxed and waned within different scholarly communities at different poin”
Evaluations of the uptake and impact of the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) Statement and extensions: a scoping review (2017, methodology): “These include the Methodological Expectations of Cochrane Intervention Reviews (MECIR) reporting standards [132, 133], the American Psychological Association Meta-Analysis Reporting Standards (MARS) [134], the ENTREQ Statement for syntheses of qualitative research [135], the RAMESES publication stan”