We must improve the low standards underlying "evidence-based practice"

Evidence-based practice is the process of identifying the best available evidence to make decisions about practices that should be deployed to support individuals in a given population (McKibbon, 1998, see Vivanti, 2022, for a review in relation to autism). Practices that meet a predefined set of evidentiary criteria are labeled “evidencebased practices” (EBPs1), to promote their adoption by service providers. A tenet of EBP is that the research used to designate EBPs should be rigorous, with the fewest risks of bias possible (Slavin, 2008). Several groups have developed EBP frameworks for conveying the extent to which intervention practices designed for autistic people are supported by evidence (e.g. National Autism Center, 2015; Reichow et al., 2008; Smith & Iadarola, 2015; Steinbrenner et al., 2020). These frameworks include algorithms for determining the number and types of studies showing an effect that must be available, and set standards for determining which studies qualify as evidence. The amount and type of evidence that should be required to designate EBPs is controversial, and autism researchers have debated about how standards should be operationalized in EBP frameworks since their initial development (Odom et al., 2005). Critics of autism EBP frameworks have argued that they: do not consider the scope of change indexed by outcome measures so that broad, developmental change and narrow, context-bound change are conflated (Sandbank et al., 2021)2; lead to an overestimation of effectiveness by tallying studies that show effects while ignoring gray literature, studies showing null effects, and studies showing iatrogenic effects (Sandbank et al., 2020; Slavin, 2008); and use taxonomies for categorizing practices that confuse practices and specific components of those practices (Ledford et al., 2021). The aim of this editorial is to point out another limitation of autism EBP frameworks, which is that research quality thresholds are much too low for making determinations about which interventions are likely to be efficacious. Low standards result in practices with questionable efficacy being labeled EBPs and promoted for use, and perpetuate the continued production of lowquality autism intervention research. How have EBP frameworks been used in autism research?