New paper - Rapid Evidence Assessments

A new paper I'm a co-author on just came out in Conservation Letters:

A Standardized Definition of Rapid Evidence Assessment for Environmental Applications

At it's heart, the paper proposes a consensus definition of what should count as a "rapid evidence assessment" (or REA) in conservation. It was hard to develop over several virtual workshops, because we had very different perspectives! The basic idea was that it can be hard to find the sweet spot when doing a literature review or evidence assessment. Too quick and dirty, and you can come to faulty conclusions by misunderstanding what evidence exists and what it says. But too complex and rigorous and the results 1) may come too late to be useful and 2) take a lot of resources that could be spent on multiple smaller studies.

For the few of us who work at conservation nonprofits, we saw systematic reviews as a typically often unattainable gold standard, and we see a lot of informal "literature scans" when time is really scarce even though we know there are important limits and downsides. But for some of the academics, what looked very rigorous to the nonprofit scientists didn't look rigorous enough to count as a "rapid evidence assessment." For example, in one moment another participant suggested that surely we would all agree a literature review done via Google Scholar was impermissibly flawed and should be excluded. But almost all of my peer-reviewed publications had literature reviews done via Google Scholar! So in the end we settled on a definition where "rapid" is relative to systematic reviews.

The paper has our final definition, recommended steps for a REA, and Table 1 has a nice little guide to picking what level of rigor may be the best fit in different circumstances. Take a look!

https://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/con4.70005