SEAwise Report on review guidelines

This deliverable report provides the framework, guidelines, and specific instructions for systematic reviews to be undertaken with SEAwise. The report also includes pre-registered review protocols for five key systematic reviews focussing on the social effects of and on fishing, ecological effects on fisheries yield, ecological effects of fisheries, spatial management impacts, and evaluation of management strategies. The results of these reviews are reported in subsequent x.1 deliverable reports and will provide a synthesis of foundational knowledge for each of SEAwise’s work packages two-through-six, respectively. 

This report contains a brief overview of the motivation for undertaking a series of systematic reviews and the selected framework that is being employed for all reviews across the project. Furthermore, this report provides detailed instructions for carrying out each step of a systematic review which can be applied to both the key SEAwise reviews, but also any other review either within or outside of this project. This includes, descriptions of how important databases function, R-scripts for processing records from databases and approaches to data-management for large collaborative reviews. 

Additionally, this report serves as the repository for the search protocols for five reviews. These protocols ensure transparent methods and reduced bias in the searching, screening and data extraction. 

The success of the coordination across five large-scale systematic reviews is illustrated in the coherence of the approaches and detailed methods described in this report.

This report describes results of the SEAwise project. More information about the project can be found at https://seawiseproject.org/