By Dr. Esmaeel Saeedy Robat, founder of MetaSyn Academy.

A protocol is not a document. It is a binding professional commitment, written before you see the data, made to every reader and reviewer who will rely on the conclusions that follow.

1. Promise One

   I will decide before I look.

   My eligibility criteria, search strategy, outcome definitions, and synthesis plan are set in writing before screening begins, and certainly before I see the data. If the literature surprises me, I either follow my original plan or I formally amend the registration. I do not silently retune what I count based on what I find.

   Mechanism: pre-registration on PROSPERO or OSF
2. Promise Two

   I will show every step.

   My methods will be transparent enough that another competent researcher could reproduce my synthesis from the protocol alone. I will report what I did, not what I intended to do, and the two will match. Where they cannot match (a search failed, a database was unavailable, a screening procedure was modified), I will report the deviation explicitly.

   Mechanism: PRISMA 2020 reporting standards
3. Promise Three

   I will declare everything that might influence me.

   Financial relationships, professional affiliations, intellectual commitments, prior work that might shape how I read the evidence, sponsor relationships, and personal stakes in the outcome are all declared at the protocol stage, not just at manuscript stage. The protocol is the document that defines who designed the methodology, and methodology design is where undeclared interests do the most damage.

   Mechanism: ICMJE-style conflict-of-interest declaration at registration
4. Promise Four

   I will document every deviation.

   Protocols evolve. Databases change names, search terms reveal terminology I had not anticipated, methodological judgments emerge during synthesis. None of this is dishonest, but undocumented deviation is. Every change between protocol and final manuscript will be visible, dated, justified, and (where applicable) sensitivity-tested against the original plan.

   Mechanism: PROSPERO amendments + explicit deviation reporting in methods
5. Promise Five

   I will report honestly, especially when it is inconvenient.

   A systematic review’s value is its truthful representation of the evidence, including evidence that points the wrong way, results that disappoint, findings that complicate the prior literature, or null effects that frustrate sponsors. The professional commitment behind systematic review is that I report what I found, in the language the findings warrant, regardless of which party would prefer a different framing.

   Mechanism: pre-specified outcome reporting + PRISMA 2020 Item 24

A note on the ‘why’ behind the promises

None of the five promises is original to MetaSyn Academy. Each one is the operational core of a methodological standard that the global evidence-synthesis community has converged on over the last two decades: PRISMA-P 2015 (Shamseer et al., BMJ 2015) for protocol design, PRISMA 2020 (Page et al., BMJ 2021) for reporting, the Cochrane Handbook v6.5 (Higgins et al., 2024) for methodological rigor, AMSTAR 2 (Shea et al., BMJ 2017) for review-quality assessment, and the ICMJE recommendations for conflict-of-interest disclosure.

What MetaSyn does differently is package these dispersed standards as promises: language that makes the human commitment visible. A checklist is something you tick. A promise is something you keep. The difference matters, because the moments when methodology fails are almost never moments of ignorance; they are moments of pressure, when a checklist is easy to rationalise but a promise is not.

Before you finalise your protocol at Station 1.3, spend one hour with this list. For each promise, write one sentence describing how your specific research context makes that promise especially relevant, and one practical step you will build into your protocol document to honour it. Take the list to Station 1.4 (Stress-Testing Your Protocol). That is where the audit happens.

Reflection prompts

These prompts are for your research journal. Nothing is submitted or stored. They exist to anchor the five promises into the protocol you will write next.

Reflection 1 · Your most vulnerable promise

Of the five promises, which one is hardest to keep in your specific research context, and what specific pressure (from co-authors, supervisors, funders, time, or self-interest) makes it hard? Name the promise. Name the pressure. Then name the one structural protection you will build into your protocol to honour the promise under that pressure.

Reflection 2 · The audit you would survive

Imagine your protocol and final manuscript are audited by a senior methodologist at PROSPERO three years from now. What is the single decision in your research process that you would most want to be able to defend in that audit? Write the decision. Then write the documentation you will build into your protocol now, so that defence is possible later.