Framing systematic reviews commissioned by policymakers as a hermeneutic process: A methodological commentary

Policymakers increasingly seek to use systematic reviews to inform policy decisions in a wide variety of policy areas. The use of rigorous methods for assessing the available evidence makes systematic reviews a key tool in this context. However, the emphasis on rigorous methods can also pose challenges for policymaking, as this can constrain systematic reviews from adapting to complex and localised policy needs. Subsequently, commentators have argued that systematic reviews need to be more accommodating of policymakers’ interests. In this paper, we aim to show how researchers and policymakers can work together to produce systematic reviews which are useful for policy purposes, using hermeneutics as a theoretical framework. Specifically, we describe the central processes of a systematic review with reference to hermeneutics, with a view to developing an understanding of what is happening when researchers and policymakers work together. This draws attention to the importance of shared interpretive decisions that shape the development and conduct of systematic reviews, but which are typically unacknowledged in conventional methodological accounts. Furthermore, we argue that hermeneutics can provide reassurance that the inevitable interpretive decisions which take place in this context are not deviations from best practice, but in fact strengthen a systematic review for policy purposes. The paper sets out this account in several stages which align with key systematic review tasks relating to planning, carrying out and reporting a systematic review.