Best evidence toolkits: a case study on interventions for preventing violence against women and girls (VAWG)

Research teams report challenges in conducting overviews and many of these relate to the synthesis of outcome data from multiple reviews that lead to unclear evidence. This limits research from being used by policymakers and other review users who need accessible robust evidence. In this commentary, we present a case study on creating a toolkit of interventions for preventing violence against women and girls (VAWG). This toolkit is underpinned by systematic methods and a priori criteria that identify a single best up-to-date systematic review of each subtopic. The best evidence toolkit approach does not require the synthesis of multiple reviews and produces clear, standardised evidence across subtopics efficiently. This approach offers a pragmatic alternative to overviews when presenting a broad spectrum of intervention approaches, populations or outcomes. This approach may be particularly beneficial when the primary aim is to communicate with policymakers.