Evidence Synthesis in Climate & Health: A systematic map of reporting quality and digital tool use

The field of climate and health (C&H) is expanding rapidly and has experienced a substantial increase in evidence synthesis efforts, to help provide robust guidance for policy and practice. To facilitate the efficiency and effectiveness of such work, a range of tools have been developed to help streamline the evidence synthesis process – henceforth referred to as Digital Evidence Synthesis Tools (DESTs) -, including those integrating machine learning. However, to help provide recommendations to tool developers and funders about where our focus should be to enable the next step-change in evidence synthesis, more information is needed about which tools are currently being used by C&H researchers, and at which stages of the review process. To this end, a systematic map is currently being undertaken of evidence syntheses published in the field of C&H up to December 2023 (n = 469). Deduplication, screening and data extraction were undertaken in EPPI Reviewer, with analysis facilitated by an an openly accessible EPPI Visualiser database. The findings reveal that a substantial percentage do not report tool utilisation (43.5%), with only 12.4% (n = 58) of all reviews using purpose-built systematic review platforms, such as Covidence. Particularly surprising was the lack of reviews that reported any tools used during screening (20.9%, n = 98), which is the stage that has been evaluated the most, and where arguably the most digital evidence synthesis tools exist. The authors will provide information about the quality of reporting in C&H evidence syntheses, as well as provide recommendations for future DEST use and development in the field.