Meta-narrative review developed by Greenhalgh and colleagues is a new interpretive systematic review approach within an expanding portfolio of evidence synthesis methods that focus on context, meaning and process. Informed by Kuhn’s notion of scientific paradigms, the method seeks to develop storylines of how research on a given topic unfolds over time, highlighting key discoveries and insights. This article reports how we drew on the meta-narrative approach in a review that examined the changing and contested nature of ‘community’ as understood across disciplines and research traditions. We discuss the challenges that arose in our review and the strengths and limitations of our approach. We conclude that the meta-narrative approach provides a useful framework for making sense of the multiple and changing conceptualisations of community while accounting for historical context. We recommend that an avenue for further development of the method is to consider Foucault’s sociological approach to tracing knowledge.