Welcome to the International Database of Education Systematic Reviews.

IDESR is a database of published systematic reviews in Education and a clearinghouse for protocol registration of ongoing and planned systematic reviews.  From this page you can:

• dive straight in and search the database
• register a protocol for a planned systematic review
• read more about IDESR,
• explore the rationale for IDESR
• meet the team behind the IDESR project.

IDESR is now in its second phase of development and is accepting registrations of review protocols for all areas of education. Please check the inclusion criteria and submission guidance here. The library arm will continue to focus on published reviews in Language Education for the time being.

IDESR accepts registrations of protocols for systematic reviews in all fields of education.

We operationalise systematic reviews as follows:

Systematic reviews are rigorous, transparent and replicable reviews of research literature. High quality systematic reviews aim to identify all relevant published and unpublished research reports on a given topic and provide an unbiased summary of totality of that evidence.

Systematic reviews select for inclusion reports of studies using a series of transparent and replicable steps. These include applying a predetermined systematic search strategy and assessment of the eligibility of studies for inclusion using clear inclusion/exclusion criteria.

The quality of each study included in the review should be assessed for trustworthiness. The criteria by which trustworthiness is assessed is informed by the types of study eligible for the review. For example, reviews of experiments might use the Cochrane Risk of Bias Tool, or Gorard's Sieve. Reviews of qualitative studies might use the Quality in Qualitative Evaluation Tool; observational studies might use the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale.

The assembled body of evidence should be synthesised using narrative and/or statistical synthesis (meta-analysis) and interpreted taking into account the quality of the studies included.

For more information about the characteristics of high quality systematic reviews, reference should be made to PRISMA (the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses) at www.prisma-statement.org.

Note: Although the terms are often used interchangeably, a meta-analysis is not a systematic review, it is a statistical technique. A systematic review may incorporate a meta-analysis, but to be considered a systematic review, the study must adhere to the methodological characteristics summarised above.

Protocol Registration

Before embarking on a systematic review, it is good scientific practice to prepare a protocol detailing the steps that will be taken to reduce biases in preparing the review, and to make this protocol publicly available. This helps to guard against poor scientific practices, such as outcome switching, selective reporting, and failure to publish. In addition, protocol registration helps to reduce unnecessary duplication of effort (by allowing prospective reviewers to check if other researchers have already embarked on a review addressing the same or a similar topic), and to foster collaboration (by alerting reviewers to other groups interested in the same or similar topics). It also gives reviewers an opportunity to demonstrate their commitment to open science. This is one of the key objectives of the IDESR Registry.

How to register your protocol

Before you start

Check IDESR and other relevant databases for systematic reviews that have already been published or that are ongoing or proposed. Satisfy yourself that your proposed review does not unnecessarily duplicate work that has been or is being done.

You should have a complete or near complete protocol. If you intend to have your protocol peer-reviewed, this should be done before you begin the registration process. Protocols should be prepared in accordance with PRISMA-P (the PRISMA extension for protocols for systematic reviews), available here.

Confirm that work on the review has not progressed beyond the search phase. We understand that reviewers may have piloted their search strategy and may have screened some of the records returned in the pilot to help refine their inclusion/exclusion criteria before they are ready to submit a protocol registration. Thus, we do not insist that no work has been undertaken in the preparation of the review prior to registration. However, pre-registration is only helpful in reducing the potential for bias if it happens before the main bulk of the work on the review begins. That said, sometimes during the process of conducting a systematic review, new information comes to light and changes to the protocol are deemed necessary. In such cases, an update to the protocol should be submitted to IDESR. This will be date-stamped and published alongside the original protocol. This provides an audit trail for the review, keeping methodological choices open and transparent.

Protocols for completed and/or published systematic reviews should not be registered.

Protocols registered on IDESR should not be registered elsewhere. To maintain the integrity of the protocol registration process, only one version of a protocol registration should exist.

Submissions to IDESR must be in English. Though great fans of multilingualism, the IDESR team is not able to process applications in languages other than English. However, search terms may be in any language, and authors can include a link to different language versions of the protocol if they wish.

Registering your protocol

To register the protocol for your systematic review, first set up an IDESR account. You can do this here.

Once you have set up your account you will be able to access the protocol registration form. Completion is straightforward and involves entering the relevant information from your protocol into the appropriate fields on the form. A blank version of the form is available here (PDF/Word) to assist with preparing your draft protocol before finalising it for upload.

Once you have completed all the fields and clicked 'submit', you will receive a confirmation email and your application will be sent to one of the IDESR team for review. Once it has been reviewed you will receive an email telling you either a) that the application has been accepted for publication; b) that further information is required before your submission can be accepted; or c) that the application has been rejected (stating the reasons for this).

Note: IDESR is a clearinghouse for registrations of systematic review protocols, not an arbiter of the necessity or merit of any individual review, nor a judge of a review's methodological quality. These are matters for the review team, its funders, and the body providing peer review of the research. The IDESR team is responsible only for confirming that a protocol registration reflects the minimum criteria for systematic review protocols, as laid out in PRISMA-P, and to make a permanent, publicly available record of those which do. The decision to accept or reject your application will be made on the basis of these criteria only.

Access to your application will be suspended while it is being processed.

Once accepted, your registration will be converted to a PDF file and added to the IDESR Registry, and it will be made available to view by all users of the site.

Once published on the IDESR website, you will be able to update your registration if necessary. All updates will be date stamped to provide an audit trail.

On completion of your review you should update the record to say that the review is complete and to provide information about where it has been published. Bibliographic information about your published review will be added to the IDESR Library and will include a link back to your IDESR protocol.

Copyright

Authors of published protocols retain the copyright to their words and grant IDESR exclusive rights to publish them in the form of an IDESR protocol registration. Authors agree to these being published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs licence. This license allows others to download your works and share them with others as long as they credit you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially.

The International Database of Education Systematic Reviews (IDESR) is a free-at-the-point-of-access electronic database of published systematic reviews in the field of Education and an online space where planned and ongoing Education systematic reviews can be registered, searched for and viewed.

IDESR is currently in its first phase of development, focusing on cataloguing and registering systematic reviews from one sub-field of Education: language education. This phase of the project has been generously supported by a John Fell Fund award and will serve as proof of concept for future funding bids to support the expansion of IDESR to include systematic reviews from all sub-fields of Education.

If you have any questions or feedback about IDESR, please contact hamish.chalmers@education.ox.ac.uk

Ethical and useful research should build on what is already known, and systematic reviews of existing research are key in this regard. Systematic reviews aim to locate, critically assess, and synthesise the totality of reliable evidence relevant to a particular topic or question. When looking to inform educational policy, decision makers frequently rely on systematic reviews for an up-to-date, quality-assessed overview of available evidence. Teachers, teacher educators and publishers also look to systematic reviews for digestible, evidence-based guidance, seeking to underpin pedagogy and materials development with substantiated insights and approaches, a practice which is ultimately beneficial to their learners and so to society at large. Systematic reviews are thus a crucial element of the knowledge base on which the field of Education is founded. Despite their importance, however, locating systematic reviews in Education can be difficult and time-consuming. A dedicated database of Education systematic reviews is needed to simplify the location of Systematic Reviews in Education.

In addition to a database of completed systematic reviews, Education lacks a platform through which to register ongoing and planned systematic reviews. Prospective registration provides transparency by providing a permanent record of planned systematic reviews, irrespective of whether they are eventually published, and helps to detect and address publication bias (with underreporting of 'unflattering' or 'unexciting reviews'). Prospective registration helps researchers and other users to assess the published versions of systematic reviews against their protocols, and helping them to identify instances of poor practice, e.g., outcome switching. Prospective registration also helps those commissioning or planning systematic reviews to identify whether reviews on their chosen topic are already in preparation, thus helping to avoid duplication of effort, and facilitating collaboration. While registries for planned systematic reviews exist in other disciplines (e.g., PROSPERO for health-related reviews), until IDESR there has been no such registry in Education.

IDESR is coordinated by Dr Hamish Chalmers of the Department of Education, University of Oxford. Initial set up of IDESR was supported by Dr Jessica Briggs Baffoe-Djan and Jessica Brown (IDESR Research Assistant), and the IDESR advisory group as listed below.

The IDESR website was built and is maintained by Gordon Dooley and Metaxis Software Design.

If you have any questions or feedback about IDESR, please contact hamish.chalmers@education.ox.ac.uk