Systematic review reporting frameworks have been developed to establish basic standards to make reports of reviews more useful to evidence-based practice and to allow for further meta-syntheses. These frameworks have tended to be methodology-specific, such as PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) [
5] and RAMESES (Realist and MEta-narrative Evidence Syntheses: Evolving Standards) [
6], reflecting a broad consensus that the primary unifying construct for reviews should be the methods they use. However, as Dornan
et al. (referencing Kelly and Murray) note: `education researchers change practice within a system that is open, complex, non-linear, organic, and historical and use qualitative as well as quantitative methods to evaluate the outcome’ [
7]. Medical education research should, therefore, be seen as a field rather than a discipline, one that brings together multiple methodological and philosophical approaches and, in doing so, it struggles to establish coherence because of this intrinsic plurality [
8]. As a result, systematic reviews in medical education tend not to share a common methodological stance: some reviews are meta-analyses of experimental results seeking an optimal form of practice while others may take the form of explanatory narrative realist reviews of what works [
9] and how it works in different contexts [
10]. This can be challenging if one expects uniformity in systematic reviews and it can be particularly confusing to clinical teachers who do not have a strong basis in the academic discourses of medical education scholarship. It can also be challenging in reporting a review to balance its anticipated utility with the disciplinary style it follows. Add to this the vanishing returns on systematicity in reviews [
11] then what may at first have seemed like a simple task, to systematically review evidence in medical education, becomes far more complicated. This is where Gordon and Gibbs have entered the fray with their common framework for reporting systematic reviews in medical education independent of their theoretical or methodological focus [
12].