A nine‐step pathway to conduct an umbrella review of literature

With the increase in research publications over recent decades, evidence synthesis has become more important in order to collate and succinctly summarize knowledge about specific topics. This offers clinicians, policy-makers, researchers, educators, and interested readers evidence across a wide range of issues. There are more than 14 different types of reviews of literature, each with their own methods.1 Of these, systematic reviews, scoping reviews, integrative, narrative and qualitative methodologies are the most common. As a secondary data source, reviews have become an increasingly popular method for summarizing vast volumes of published evidence in some fields. Disciplinary topics can be the focus of multiple reviews, for example, topics in higher education2 or in medicine.3 With many more primary and secondary evidence sources available, readers are faced with spending vast amounts of time sourcing, collating and making sense of the evidence. The umbrella review methodology overcomes this problem by synthesizing findings from a number of reviews to report on one field of research.