McMaster Evidence Review and Synthesis Centre (MERSC)

The McMaster Evidence-based Practice Center (MU-EPC) and the Effective Public Health Practice Project (EPHPP) are proposing to jointly create an Evidence Review and Synthesis Centre at McMaster University (MERSC). The MERSC will support the Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health Care (CTFPHC) by conducting between 8 and 10 'knowledge syntheses' per year. Together, the MU-EPC and EPHPP have a solid, core group of researchers and staff who have conducted over 40 knowledge syntheses, all successfully completed on time and on budget, over the last 12 years. The core group will be geographically based in Hamilton. However, the group's researchers will use their vast number of contacts to recruit other researchers from within and outside Canada to form working groups of content experts for each knowledge synthesis. The MU-EPC and EPHPP understand all of the steps and methods that are involved in designing and undertaking a knowledge synthesis. Following the assignment of the topic and the refinement of the research question(s) in conjunction with the CTFPHC, a comprehensive literature search will be conducted to find all relevant articles. We will use inclusion/exclusion criteria, developed before the literature search, to decide which articles should be included for review as part of the synthesis. We will also use established standards to assess the methodological quality of included articles, as well as explicit methods to extract and synthesize data from included articles.