Overall, key lessons identified from IEG’s evaluation of Doing Business highlight that by favoring supportive evidence and not establishing strong criteria for filtering or reporting evidence, the Doing Business reports opened the door for critics of their objectivity and accuracy, posing a reputational risk to the Bank Group and potentially misleading clients and stakeholders. The Doing Business experience revealed the need for mechanisms and safeguards to ensure the accuracy and validity of Bank Group reports and related communications using robust and transparent standards of evidence (World Bank 2022).

Because they aim to provide more robust procedures for synthesizing existing evidence (Vaessen, Lemire, and Befani 2020), structured literature reviews such as the one used for the Doing Business evaluation offer one possibility for addressing some of the shortcomings identified in the Doing Business project. Establishing clear conventions and standards for reporting literature, as such reviews do, appears essential to safeguarding and continuing to build trust in the Bank Group’s research. More broadly, establishing systematic practices for the identification and assessment of external literature provides a methodology for robustly integrating the wealth of knowledge and research that informs the topics and themes underlying evaluations.

Structured literature reviews require reviewers to outline and adhere to prespecified inclusion and exclusion criteria and methods of analysis; for this reason, they are less likely to be subject to expert bias (even if unintentional) in the selection of materials to review. In addition, they are more likely to promote transparency in experts’ methodology for identifying research to review and in reporting their findings. Even when reviews of this type are more rapid and thus less exhaustive than a full systematic review, they need not be any less systematic in their application (Moons, Goossens, and Thompson 2021).

The methods adopted by structured literature reviews may vary considerably depending on the context, time, and resources afforded to an evaluation, with no detrimental effects on the reviews’ validity. This argues against tightly defining the approaches used to conduct these reviews (which will inevitably vary). However, the basic steps outlined in the summary and the case study outlined in this paper provide a blueprint for the application of more systematic approaches to reviewing literature. Future efforts could build on the many very good practices established by other specialist organizations such as Cochrane, the Campbell Collaboration, the Collaboration for Environmental Evidence, Evidence for Policy and Practice Information, and 3ie. As it stands, the guidance outlined in this paper serves as a stepping-stone for the assessment of literature in evaluations, offering a basic scaffolding that can be altered or modified according to the needs and constraints of specific evaluations.