Table 6.

Overarching strategies of research partnerships

No.	Strategies	Subcategory
1a	Initiate partnership and identify the team members; the partnership can be initiated by researchers or stakeholders; researchers can use targeted or open strategies to identify the stakeholders	Relationship between researchers and stakeholders	Strategies throughout the research process
1b	Monitor, experiment with and evaluate the collaborative research activities on an ongoing basis
1c	Work together to develop and define norms, rules and expectations in terms of timelines and tasks; this includes defining the level of stakeholders’ engagement, roles and commitment
1d	Use a variety of activities to foster collaboration, communication and respect amongst the team members; strategies can include, but are not limited to, creating a common language, negotiating and addressing conflict, tailoring meets to the needs of the team, and providing opportunities to socialise
2a	Provide opportunities to educate and train all team members; this strategy may include training that supports capacity for collaboration or research methods	Capacity-building, support and resources
2b	Provide time, resources and funding to support the collaborative research activities; stakeholders may be paid for engagement in the research process
2c	Provide practical and emotional support to stakeholders to help overcome barriers to engagement
3a	Use a variety of methods to facilitate communication amongst team members; strategies include, but are not limited to, verbal methods (e.g. structured meetings, brainstorm sessions), written methods (e.g. email discussions, surveys) and visual methods (e.g. photovoice); this communication can be done in-person or via mediated methods (e.g. teleconference, online)	Communication between researchers and stakeholders
4a	Strategies include, but are not limited to, stakeholder engagement in identifying or refining the ‘research questions’, stakeholder engagement in development the ‘research protocol’, stakeholder engagement developing or refining ‘research instruments’ (e.g. questionnaires, interview guides) and stakeholder engagement in development of participant ‘information material’ (e.g. informed consent)	Stakeholder engagement in the planning of the research	Strategies at specific phases in the research process
5a	Strategies include, but are not limited to, stakeholder engagement in ‘data collection’ (e.g. recruitment of participants, study outcomes, conducting interviews, conducting literature review), stakeholder engagement in data analysis, and interpretation of findings	Stakeholder engagement in conducting the research
6a	Strategies include, but are not limited to, stakeholder engagement in ‘writing reports or scientific papers’ (e.g. stakeholder is co-author on a scientific paper), stakeholder engagement in ‘presenting findings’ to academic and community audiences, stakeholder engagement in a ‘developing and implementation action plan’ to ensure findings are used, and stakeholders use the findings to create change	Stakeholder engagement in dissemination and application of the research

Note: Partners include both researchers and stakeholders. We synthesised the overarching strategies from 111 strategies extracted from the included reviews. The steps taken to synthesise these overarching strategies are described in OSF-Table V. To help organise these strategies, we grouped them into six subcategories. The strategies are numbered for feasibility reasons. The order of the strategies does not relate to the frequencies