Multi‐lingual literature searches are needed to unveil global knowledge

Abstract

<p>Scientific syntheses integrate and assess knowledge in a field of research by laying out the current state of knowledge and identifying gaps, thereby fostering research on new or overlooked questions (Pullin & Stewart, 2006; Wyborn et al., 2018). From an applied ecological perspective, scientific syntheses are important tools for comparing the effects of management actions across ecosystems. Through rigorous and comprehensive scientific syntheses, managers and researchers can learn what works best to increase the efficacy of solutions to ecological problems. Because of their integrative nature, scientific syntheses in Ecology often aim to be global in scope. However, standards for what characterizes a comprehensive research synthesis of global scope are variable and, currently, literature search efforts of published scientific syntheses rarely match their proposed scope. An important issue with global scientific syntheses is language as reviews and meta-analyses tend to limit the scope of their search to few or only one language.</p>