**Review of reviews: the first step** This review of reviews provides an overview of principles, strategies, outcomes, and impacts of research partnership approaches identified from 86 reviews. This review may serve as a guide through the diverse literature of research partnership approaches, within and beyond health literature. The review of reviews is part of our [Coordinated Multicenter Team approach][1] to synthesize the research partnership literature with five conceptually-linked literature reviews. Details about the protocol is described elsewhere[ \[Hoekstra & Mrklas et al. 2018\]][2]. The findings of our review of reviews will form the basis for our next scoping reviews. ***Please note that the primarily aim of this review of reviews was to guide our next steps in synthesizing the research partnership literature (scoping reviews and umbrella reviews). As such, we did not use a comprehensive search strategy to identify relevant literature. It is, therefore, possible that we may have missed relevant reviews in this review of reviews.*** The complete manuscript is published in Health Research Policy and Systems ([Hoekstra et al. 2020][3]). [1]: https://osf.io/gvr7y/ [2]: https://systematicreviewsjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13643-018-0879-2 [3]: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12961-020-0544-9