Syntheses of research is key to the development and cumulativity of scientific knowledge in most fields (Bohlin, 2010; Eisenhart, 2008). However, it is contested whether syntheses of close-to-practice research in education require the application of formal methods, such as the approaches developed within the systematic review movement, based on the following arguments: (1) Syntheses of close-to-practice research are mainly carried out informally within the field and are integrated into the knowledge production of primary studies, as for example when the findings of previous studies form the basis for and are related to the findings of another study; (2) The production of and availability to knowledge from close-to-practice research in education is too poor compared to many other fields, such as the clinical trials within medicine, to justify the development and use of formal synthesis methods (Levinsson, 2019). However, the push for evidence-based practice in education has led to a range of initiatives aimed at bridging the gap between research and practice. Among these are the establishment of so-called ‘brokerage agencies’ with a mission to synthesise the findings of educational research (Sundberg, 2009). Previous research indicates that brokerage agencies conduct systematic reviews that tend to subordinate the outcomes of close-to-practice research to an aggregative synthesis logic or exclude it by default on the basis of predefined evidence hierarchies and quality assessments that prioritise randomised control trials to measure the impact of interventions (Levinsson & Prøitz, 2017). However, this means that the systematic review movement in education thereby might limit the potential contribution of close-to-practice research to teachers’ professional knowledge and practice. This tendency underscores the need of formal synthesis methods specifically developed for close-to-practice research. Drawing on the typology of knowledge products, suggested by Anderhag et al. (2023), this paper argues that configurative reviews (Gough et al., 2012) are more suitable for synthesising complex bodies of knowledge generated from close-to-practice research. The paper considers the four different kinds of knowledge products as a starting point for developing configurative reviews for different strands of close-to-practice research, and further illustrates how each knowledge product might require specific configurative approaches and techniques.