Living Systematic Reviews: An Emerging Opportunity to Narrow the Evidence-Practice Gap

There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

Abstract

Julian Elliott and colleagues discuss how the current inability to keep systematic reviews up-to-date hampers the translation of knowledge into action. They propose living systematic reviews as a contribution to evidence synthesis to enhance the accuracy and utility of health evidence.

Related collections

Most cited references 22

Record: found
Abstract: found
Article: not found

How quickly do systematic reviews go out of date? A survival analysis.

Kaveh Shojania, Margaret Sampson, Mohammed T Ansari … (2007)

Systematic reviews are often advocated as the best source of evidence to guide clinical decisions and health care policy, yet we know little about the extent to which they require updating. To estimate the average time to changes in evidence that are sufficiently important to warrant updating systematic reviews. Survival analysis of 100 quantitative systematic reviews. Systematic reviews published from 1995 to 2005 and indexed in ACP Journal Club. Eligible reviews evaluated a specific drug or class of drug, device, or procedure and included only randomized or quasi-randomized, controlled trials. Quantitative signals for updating were changes in statistical significance or relative changes in effect magnitude of at least 50% involving 1 of the primary outcomes of the original systematic review or any mortality outcome. Qualitative signals included substantial differences in characterizations of effectiveness, new information about harm, and caveats about the previously reported findings that would affect clinical decision making. The cohort of 100 systematic reviews included a median of 13 studies and 2663 participants per review. A qualitative or quantitative signal for updating occurred for 57% of reviews (95% CI, 47% to 67%). Median duration of survival free of a signal for updating was 5.5 years (CI, 4.6 to 7.6 years). However, a signal occurred within 2 years for 23% of reviews and within 1 year for 15%. In 7%, a signal had already occurred at the time of publication. Only 4% of reviews had a signal within 1 year of the end of the reported search period; 11% had a signal within 2 years of the search. Shorter survival was associated with cardiovascular topics (hazard ratio, 2.70 [CI, 1.36 to 5.34]) and heterogeneity in the original review (hazard ratio, 2.15 [CI, 1.12 to 4.11]). Judgments of the need for updating were made without involving content experts. In a cohort of high-quality systematic reviews directly relevant to clinical practice, signals for updating occurred frequently and within a relatively short time.

0 comments Cited 228 times – based on 0 reviews      Review now

Bookmark

Record: found
Abstract: found
Article: found

Is Open Access

Sequential methods for random-effects meta-analysis

Julian P. T. Higgins, Anne Whitehead, Mark Simmonds (2010)

Although meta-analyses are typically viewed as retrospective activities, they are increasingly being applied prospectively to provide up-to-date evidence on specific research questions. When meta-analyses are updated account should be taken of the possibility of false-positive findings due to repeated significance tests. We discuss the use of sequential methods for meta-analyses that incorporate random effects to allow for heterogeneity across studies. We propose a method that uses an approximate semi-Bayes procedure to update evidence on the among-study variance, starting with an informative prior distribution that might be based on findings from previous meta-analyses. We compare our methods with other approaches, including the traditional method of cumulative meta-analysis, in a simulation study and observe that it has Type I and Type II error rates close to the nominal level. We illustrate the method using an example in the treatment of bleeding peptic ulcers. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

0 comments Cited 84 times – based on 0 reviews      Review now

Bookmark

Record: found
Abstract: found
Article: not found

Applications of text mining within systematic reviews.

James Thomas, John McNaught, Sophia Ananiadou (2011)

Systematic reviews are a widely accepted research method. However, it is increasingly difficult to conduct them to fit with policy and practice timescales, particularly in areas which do not have well indexed, comprehensive bibliographic databases. Text mining technologies offer one possible way forward in reducing the amount of time systematic reviews take to conduct. They can facilitate the identification of relevant literature, its rapid description or categorization, and its summarization. In this paper, we describe the application of four text mining technologies, namely, automatic term recognition, document clustering, classification and summarization, which support the identification of relevant studies in systematic reviews. The contributions of text mining technologies to improve reviewing efficiency are considered and their strengths and weaknesses explored. We conclude that these technologies do have the potential to assist at various stages of the review process. However, they are relatively unknown in the systematic reviewing community, and substantial evaluation and methods development are required before their possible impact can be fully assessed. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

0 comments Cited 70 times – based on 0 reviews      Review now

Bookmark

All references

Author and article information

Journal

Journal ID (nlm-ta): PLoS Med

Journal ID (iso-abbrev): PLoS Med

Journal ID (publisher-id): PLoS

Journal ID (pmc): plosmed

Title: PLoS Medicine

Publisher: Public Library of Science (San Francisco, USA )

ISSN (Print): 1549-1277

ISSN (Electronic): 1549-1676

Publication date Collection: February 2014

Publication date (Electronic): 18 February 2014

Volume: 11

Issue: 2

Electronic Location Identifier: e1001603

Affiliations

[1 ]Department of Infectious Diseases, Alfred Hospital and Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

[2 ]School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

[3 ]World Vision Australia, Melbourne, Australia

[4 ]National Trauma Research Institute, Alfred Hospital, Melbourne, Australia

[5 ]EPPI-Centre, Institute of Education, University of London, London, England

[6 ]School of Social and Community Medicine, University of Bristol, Bristol, England

[7 ]Centre for Reviews and Dissemination, University of York, York, England

[8 ]Informatics and Knowledge Management Department, The Cochrane Collaboration, Freiburg, Germany

[9 ]Department of Surgery, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

Author notes

* E-mail: julian.elliott@ 123456alfred.org.au

All authors are contributors to the Cochrane Collaboration. JHE is a Senior Research Fellow at the Australasian Cochrane Centre, which supports the conduct and use of systematic reviews. The views expressed in this paper are JHE's own and not necessarily those of the Australasian Cochrane Centre or the Cochrane Collaboration. TT has an unpaid adjunct position as a Senior Research Fellow at the Australasian Cochrane Centre, which supports the conduct and use of systematic reviews. The views expressed in this paper are TT's own and not necessarily those of the Australasian Cochrane Centre or the Cochrane Collaboration. CM is an Academic Editor for PLOS ONE and is a full-time employee of The Cochrane Collaboration. JHE and RG co-lead the development of a systematic review workflow management tool (Covidence). Covidence has been developed with funding from competitive government grants and is provided as a not-for-profit service to the systematic review community.

Wrote the first draft of the manuscript: JHE. Contributed to the writing of the manuscript: JHE TT OC JT JH CM RLG. ICMJE criteria for authorship read and met: JHE TT OC JT JH CM RLG. Agree with manuscript results and conclusions: JHE TT OC JT JH CM RLG.

The Policy Forum allows health policy makers around the world to discuss challenges and opportunities for improving health care in their societies.

Article

Publisher ID: PMEDICINE-D-13-02601

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1001603

PMC ID: 3928029

PubMed ID: 24558353

SO-VID: bdcc62dc-bfe9-40fd-9202-7513f01941ca

License:

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

History

Page count

Pages: 6

Funding

JHE is supported by a National Health and Medical Research Council Early Career Fellowship (APP1037839). RLG is supported by a National Health and Medical Research Council Practitioner Fellowship. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Living Systematic Reviews: An Emerging Opportunity to Narrow the Evidence-Practice Gap

Read this article at

Abstract

Related collections

Annual Reviews: Coronavirus Research

Most cited references 22

How quickly do systematic reviews go out of date? A survival analysis.

Sequential methods for random-effects meta-analysis

Applications of text mining within systematic reviews.

Author and article information

Journal

Affiliations

Author notes

Article

History

Page count

Funding

Categories

Comments

Comment on this article

Similar content 632

Cited by 172

Most referenced authors 806