For anyone involved in leveraging research to make a meaningful impact, the UNICEF Office of Research – Innocenti has long been a beacon, shaping global debates on child rights and development. Their series of Methodological Briefs provides crucial guidance on evidence synthesis, a powerful tool for collating knowledge from multiple studies to inform programming and policy decisions.

Methodological Brief 6, titled ‘The future of evidence synthesis and knowledge brokering,’ delves into emerging innovations and cutting-edge debates within this field. It highlights that traditional evidence synthesis is incredibly labour-intensive, often requiring the screening of tens of thousands of studies. To combat this, the brief explores several crucial advancements:

• Microtasks and Crowdsourcing: Breaking down large projects into smaller, parallel contributions allows a wider community to participate in tasks like study screening, significantly reducing workload while maintaining quality.
• Machine Learning and AI: These technologies can semi-automate the screening process by prioritising relevant studies, substantially cutting down work without compromising quality. Crowdsourced decisions can even train AI models.
• ‘Living’ Systematic Reviews: These reviews are continuously updated with new evidence as it becomes available, ensuring decision-makers have the most current insights.

The brief also points out a key challenge: many of these innovations — which have been mostly developed for health sciences — remain untested in the field of international development. This is a problem, because social sciences often present more complex policy problems and varied reporting styles, which may complicate the application of AI and crowdsourcing.

Beyond technological advancements, the brief underscores the rise of knowledge brokering as the ‘fourth wave’ of the science revolution. Knowledge brokers are very important people and organisations that build relationships between knowledge producers and users, which facilitates the exchange of knowledge and evidence-informed decision-making. 

This brief is a must-read for professionals who conduct, commission, or interpret research and evaluation findings in development contexts. It is also highly relevant to researchers, policymakers, and practitioners interested in the intersection of technology, data, and social impact.