Why are evidence resources useful?

Simply put, evidence resources should save you time. They help you find evidence quickly and easily by bringing together selected research from a range of sources in one place. Evidence resources typically include:

• Search functions that hunt for relevant evidence across a wide range of sources (eg eep).
• Summaries or digests of recent evidence.
• Lists or directories of evidence sources

Different evidence resources have different purposes so they have selection criteria to determine what evidence to include. The selection criteria may be based on:

• the intended users, for example, TTRB selects evidence on the basis of what may be useful for teacher educators and those training to teach.
• the evidence type, for example, EPPI houses only systematic reviews

Understanding why the resource was initially set up and how they select evidence to include is important, as this will give you an idea of whether the resource will be useful to you.