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How to conduct systematic reviews more expeditiously?

Healthcare consumers, researchers, patients and policy makers increasingly use systematic reviews (SRs) to aid their decision-making process. However, the conduct of SRs can be a time-consuming and resource-intensive task. Often, clinical practice guideline developers or other decision-makers need t...

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Autores principales: Tsertsvadze, Alexander, Chen, Yen-Fu, Moher, David, Sutcliffe, Paul, McCarthy, Noel
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2015
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4643500/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26563648
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s13643-015-0147-7
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author Tsertsvadze, Alexander
Chen, Yen-Fu
Moher, David
Sutcliffe, Paul
McCarthy, Noel
author_facet Tsertsvadze, Alexander
Chen, Yen-Fu
Moher, David
Sutcliffe, Paul
McCarthy, Noel
author_sort Tsertsvadze, Alexander
collection PubMed
description Healthcare consumers, researchers, patients and policy makers increasingly use systematic reviews (SRs) to aid their decision-making process. However, the conduct of SRs can be a time-consuming and resource-intensive task. Often, clinical practice guideline developers or other decision-makers need to make informed decisions in a timely fashion (e.g. outbreaks of infection, hospital-based health technology assessments). Possible approaches to address the issue of timeliness in the production of SRs are to (a) implement process parallelisation, (b) adapt and apply innovative technologies, and/or (c) modify SR processes (e.g. study eligibility criteria, search sources, data extraction or quality assessment). Highly parallelised systematic reviewing requires substantial resources to support a team of experienced information specialists, reviewers and methodologists working alongside with clinical content experts to minimise the time for completing individual review steps while maximising the parallel progression of multiple steps. Effective coordination and management within the team and across external stakeholders are essential elements of this process. Emerging innovative technologies have a great potential for reducing workload and improving efficiency of SR production. The most promising areas of application would be to allow automation of specific SR tasks, in particular if these tasks are time consuming and resource intensive (e.g. language translation, study selection, data extraction). Modification of SR processes involves restricting, truncating and/or bypassing one or more SR steps, which may risk introducing bias to the review findings. Although the growing experiences in producing various types of rapid reviews (RR) and the accumulation of empirical studies exploring potential bias associated with specific SR tasks have contributed to the methodological development for expediting SR production, there is still a dearth of research examining the actual impact of methodological modifications and comparing the findings between RRs and SRs. This evidence would help to inform as to which SR tasks can be accelerated or truncated and to what degree, while maintaining the validity of review findings. Timely delivered SRs can be of value in informing healthcare decisions and recommendations, especially when there is practical urgency and there is no other relevant synthesised evidence.
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spelling pubmed-46435002015-11-14 How to conduct systematic reviews more expeditiously? Tsertsvadze, Alexander Chen, Yen-Fu Moher, David Sutcliffe, Paul McCarthy, Noel Syst Rev Commentary Healthcare consumers, researchers, patients and policy makers increasingly use systematic reviews (SRs) to aid their decision-making process. However, the conduct of SRs can be a time-consuming and resource-intensive task. Often, clinical practice guideline developers or other decision-makers need to make informed decisions in a timely fashion (e.g. outbreaks of infection, hospital-based health technology assessments). Possible approaches to address the issue of timeliness in the production of SRs are to (a) implement process parallelisation, (b) adapt and apply innovative technologies, and/or (c) modify SR processes (e.g. study eligibility criteria, search sources, data extraction or quality assessment). Highly parallelised systematic reviewing requires substantial resources to support a team of experienced information specialists, reviewers and methodologists working alongside with clinical content experts to minimise the time for completing individual review steps while maximising the parallel progression of multiple steps. Effective coordination and management within the team and across external stakeholders are essential elements of this process. Emerging innovative technologies have a great potential for reducing workload and improving efficiency of SR production. The most promising areas of application would be to allow automation of specific SR tasks, in particular if these tasks are time consuming and resource intensive (e.g. language translation, study selection, data extraction). Modification of SR processes involves restricting, truncating and/or bypassing one or more SR steps, which may risk introducing bias to the review findings. Although the growing experiences in producing various types of rapid reviews (RR) and the accumulation of empirical studies exploring potential bias associated with specific SR tasks have contributed to the methodological development for expediting SR production, there is still a dearth of research examining the actual impact of methodological modifications and comparing the findings between RRs and SRs. This evidence would help to inform as to which SR tasks can be accelerated or truncated and to what degree, while maintaining the validity of review findings. Timely delivered SRs can be of value in informing healthcare decisions and recommendations, especially when there is practical urgency and there is no other relevant synthesised evidence. BioMed Central 2015-11-12 /pmc/articles/PMC4643500/ /pubmed/26563648 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s13643-015-0147-7 Text en © Tsertsvadze et al. 2015 Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
spellingShingle Commentary
Tsertsvadze, Alexander
Chen, Yen-Fu
Moher, David
Sutcliffe, Paul
McCarthy, Noel
How to conduct systematic reviews more expeditiously?
title How to conduct systematic reviews more expeditiously?
title_full How to conduct systematic reviews more expeditiously?
title_fullStr How to conduct systematic reviews more expeditiously?
title_full_unstemmed How to conduct systematic reviews more expeditiously?
title_short How to conduct systematic reviews more expeditiously?
title_sort how to conduct systematic reviews more expeditiously?
topic Commentary
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4643500/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26563648
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s13643-015-0147-7
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