Evidenzsynthesen: „Focused Mapping Review and Synthesis“ als weiteres Mitglied einer Reviewfamilie?

Abstract

Over the past 50 years, different types of reviews evolved with different objectives. In a summary, 48 review types were identified, which were grouped into seven “review families” with regard to their underlyinbjectives and their literature search methods. Among these, the “Focused Mapping Review and Synthesis” (FMRS) approach was not considered. The aim of our short paper is to introduce FMRS as a potential further member of a review family and to highlight its methodological characteristics, potentials, and challenges. FMRS can be used for exploration and focused description of a wide range of topics, but especially fos-pects of knowledge production, i.e., methodological and theoretical issues. A specific search in PubMed and medRxiv revealed nine publi-cations on FMRS between 2016 and 2022, the majority of which addressed research practice as the object of investigation, rather than topics of clinical research. The inclusion of the FMRS in a review family would be welcome due to the peculiarities of the systematisation of literature search within the approach of FMRS.

Keywords

• focused mapping review
• evidence synthesis
• literature review
• methods