Generally, evidence synthesis projects are not an exercise in creative writing so be sure to look over examples of published evidence syntheses in your disciplinary area. You most likely have a few of these examples lying around from your exploratory or comprehensive searches. These papers can help you focus the structure of your manuscript and alert you to disciplinary expectations for these kinds of publications.

Connect with Your Librarian

If for some reason, you did not find any published evidence syntheses in your field, this might be a good time to reach out to the librarian for your college or program for help with locating relevant examples.

Review Methodological Guidance (re. Reporting)

This also a good time to revist disciplinary guidance in the "Methodological guidance" module (2. Determine Evidence Synthesis Method tab) as some of these guidelines may address reporting expectations in the write-up. If your discipline guidance or your target journal doesn't explicitly suggest using some kind of reporting framework, consider reviewing PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews) as guidance for what to report out in the manuscript. It is worth taking a look at the PRISMA Expanded Checklist which provides substantive detail on 27 items that are recommended to be addressed in writing in the manuscript (typically for systematic and several other review types, but even more extensions to this reporting framework are in development). If those items are successfully addressed, a large part of the manuscript will be drafted.

Determine Authorship

Authorship matters (who gets credit and who doesn't) for these and other projects so consider having a conversation with your team (if you haven't already) about authorship and acknowledgements. ICMJE's framework for "Defining the Role of Authors and Contributors" has been widely used to guide these conversations and decisions. Note that disclosures about the use of AI in your project are now addressed by the ICMJE guidance. Your target journal may also have guidance around this topic and authorship more generally.

Graduate Students

Graduate student participants of evidence synthesis teams have access to the OSU Graduate Writing Center (online or in-person consultations available). "While Graduate Writing Consultants may not be experts in your field, they are trained to identify disciplinary communication and content expectations so that you may meet your writing goals."

While this section won't apply to most evidence synthesis projects, there are few tools that have built-in manuscript writing support using information entered or analyses done along the way.

• Cochrane's RevMan (fee-based tool) - mostly used by those doing Cochrane reviews (biomedical)
• JBI 's SUMARI (fee-based tool) - designed to support researchers across disciplines following JBI's methodology
• SR-Accelerator (free) - has 2 tools (TrialWizard & TIDieR) for writing the methods section (one specificially for RCT's - randomized controlled trials)

The final step in your evidence synthesis project is publishing your manuscript in an appropriate journal - one that provides your desired journal quality and audience. There is no one way to determine the appropriate journal for your project, but hopefully you have given your target journal some thought prior to writing or finishing the manuscript to be efficient about meeting the author requirements).

To determine some possible journals to consider for your project, try the following:

• use Web of Science to view a list of search results by "Journal Title" (under the left-side filters) to see how many of the articles are published by each journal
• explore "manuscript matching" services offered by a variety of publisher-related entities (e.g., Clarivate "Match my manuscript" - requires free account; Elsevier's "Match my abstract"; Wiley's "Journal finder", and others)

In the process of looking at publication options, consider the benefits of publishing in an open-access journal.

Before signing any publisher's copyright transfer agreement, a reminder that OSU authors retain copyright to their published articles so don't sign away your rights.