The rising popularity of evidence-based health policy and evidence based practice in the 1990s led to recognition of the importance of research syntheses in other disciplines such as education (Evans and Benefield, 2001). However not everyone welcomed such a trend (Hammersley, 2001). Nevertheless, a similar political push for evidence-based policy and practice started to gain pace in other fields such as social care and management (see, for example, Davies et al., 2000; Nutley et al., 2002; Trinder and Reynolds, 2000). Governments began to fund initiatives committed to supporting research syntheses, particularly systematic reviews