Review & Rating Guidelines

Overview

CLEAR reviews and rates research studies based on the strength of their causal evidence. We have developed review & rating guidelines to guide our process. We developed the guidelines to ensure a comprehensive and reliable framework. For each research study, we use our guidelines to assess the quality of causal evidence and assign ratings to indicate the robustness of the findings. This ensures that labor-related research is accessible and reliable for providers, policymakers, and researchers. Below is more information on our review & rating process.

CLEAR’s Review & Rating Process

Identify research questions of interest from DOL’s Learning Agenda process, and consider relevance to stakeholders at the federal, state, and local levels (learn more about *DOL’s Evidence Building Plans and Assessments). 
Develop evidence review protocol in consultation with subject matter and technical experts. CLEAR posts all protocols online to ensure transparency and enable replicability of the evidence reviews. 
Search academic databases and grey literature sources for potentially relevant rigorous studies. 
Screen the literature for studies that meet standards. This might include preliminary search and screening steps to understand the size and type of literature in an evidence base. 
Summarize and rate, if applicable, the eligible studies that pass screening based on our guidelines (see supporting documents below) and produce “Study Profiles.” Study profiles are one-page plain language summaries of the studies, and include causal evidence ratings as a signal of study “quality”; in other words, the strength of the design, adherence during implementation, and to what extent the findings can be attributable to the intervention examined. CLEAR confirms an absence of conflict of interest for each study reviewed.  
Maintain a searchable citation database of all study profiles – see “Search for Studies” – that makes this research more accessible to policymakers, practitioners, researchers and the public. 
Synthesize the research across studies in different labor topics, highlighting the effectiveness of different approaches and gaps in literature where further research may be needed. CLEAR engages subject matter and technical experts to provide peer-review of its evidence syntheses.