Where the longer work is carried together.
The team route. Members gather, a method is presented, and projects too long for one sitting are picked up again from meeting to meeting until they are finished. It is the setting in which systematic reviews and meta-analyses are actually completed.
A method presented, then work that continues.
Each meeting has two halves. In the first, a new skill or method is presented to the group by whoever is carrying it: a design, an analysis, a tool, a way of reading a literature. In the second, the projects already underway are reviewed and moved on.
The projects are the ones that do not fit a single session. A systematic review and meta-analysis is the clearest example: screening, extraction, synthesis and writing each take weeks, and each is easier to sustain in a group that meets regularly than alone. Progress is expected between meetings, not only during them.
A team of approved members.
Research Development Meetings are for approved members of the Centre, and joining requires an application. The group is kept to a size at which every project can be reviewed properly in the time available, so places are allocated rather than open.
Members who have completed Foundational Training and are working on a skill under individual supervision are well placed to join: the team route and the individual route are designed to run alongside each other rather than in sequence.
Finished work, with authorship settled early.
The point of the format is completion. A project is carried until it is a manuscript that can be submitted, and contributions are recorded as the work goes rather than reconstructed at the end, so authorship follows the ICMJE criteria on the evidence of what people actually did.