Systematic review of meta-analyses to assess the impacts of farming practices - A methodological framework
by Makowski D., Bosco S., Chen M., Montero-Castaño A., Pérez-Soba M., Schievano A., Terres J-M (2021). DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/byuw9.
Monday 4 March 2024, by Carlos San Juan
Identifying sustainable agricultural practices to support policy development requires a rigorous
synthesis of scientific evidence based on experiments carried out around the world. In agricultural
science, meta-analyses (MAs) are now commonly used to assess the impact of farming practices on a
variety of outcomes, including crop and livestock productions, biodiversity, greenhouse gas
emissions, nitrate leaching, soil organic carbon, based on a large number of experimental data. MA
has become a gold standard method for quantitative research synthesis, and the growing number of
MAs available can potentially be used to inform decisions of policy makers. However, published MAs
are heterogeneous both in content and quality and a framework is needed to help scientists to
report the results and quality levels of MAs in a rigorous and transparent manner. Such a framework
must be implementable quickly - within weeks - to be operational and compatible with the time
constraints of modern policymaking processes. In this paper, we propose a methodological
framework for assessing the impacts of farming practices based on a systematic review of published
MAs. The framework includes four main steps: (1) literature search of existing MAs, (2) screening and
selection of MAs, (3) data extraction and quality assessment, and (4) reporting. Three types of
reports are generated from the extracted data: individual reports summarizing the contents of each
MA (MA summary reports), reports summarizing each of the impacts of a given farming practice on a
specific environmental, climate mitigation, or production outcome (single-impact reports), and
reports summarizing all the impacts of a given farming practice on all the outcomes considered
(general report). All these reports present the quality levels of the MAs examined based on 16
quality criteria. The proposed framework is semi-automatic in the sense that the skeletons of the
reports are generated automatically from the spreadsheet used for the data extraction and quality
assessment. This semi-automatic procedure allows scientific experts to reduce the time needed in
the reporting step. Since 2020, the proposed framework was successfully applied by a group of
scientific experts to support the decisions of EU policymakers and examine a large diversity of single
farming practices (e.g. nitrification inhibitors, biochar, liming) and cropping systems (e.g. organic
systems, agroforestry) in a relatively short period of time. It provides an operational tool for
scientists who want to supply policymakers with scientific evidence based on large numbers of
experiments, in a timely and reproducible manner.