A review that changed local practice

Most researchers who come to SRN arrive with the same problem: a question they care about, and no clear path from that question to a review that others will trust. The distance between the two is where good intentions usually stall — in an unregistered protocol, a search that misses half the literature, an appraisal done by instinct rather than method.

From a question to a protocol

SRN's beginner course is built to close exactly that gap. Over its sessions, a participant takes a vague research interest and sharpens it into an answerable question, structured with PICO. They learn to write a protocol, register it on PROSPERO before the work begins, and build a search strategy they can actually run across the major databases. By the end, the review is no longer an idea — it has a documented plan that another researcher could follow and reproduce.

That shift, from instinct to method, is the single change that most often separates a review that gets published from one that is quietly abandoned. It is unglamorous work, and it is the work that matters.

Method that travels

The point of teaching it this way is that the skill does not stay with one review. A researcher who has registered one protocol and run one reproducible search carries that method into everything they do next — and, often, teaches it to the colleagues and students around them. Capacity built once tends to multiply.

The workshop took me from not knowing where to start to having a registered protocol and a search strategy I could actually run. The step-by-step, hands-on format made all the difference.

That is the change SRN is built to produce: not a single review, but researchers who know how to produce trustworthy reviews again and again, in the settings where the evidence is needed most.