title: How to conduct systematic reviews more expeditiously?
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Communicable Disease Control Epidemiology and Evidence, Populations, Evidence and Technologies, Division of Health Sciences, Warwick Medical School, University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL, UK. a.tsertsvadze.1@warwick.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Alexander
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Tsertsvadze
authors.affiliation: Warwick Centre for Applied Health Research & Delivery (W-CAHRD), Division of Health Sciences, Warwick Medical School, University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL, UK. Y-F.Chen@warwick.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Yen-Fu
authors.initials: YF
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.affiliation: Ottawa Methods Centre, Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, The Ottawa Hospital, General Campus, Centre for Practice Changing Research Building, 501 Smyth Road, PO BOX 201B, Ottawa, Ontario, K1H 8L6, Canada. dmoher@ohri.ca.
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Moher
authors.affiliation: Populations, Evidence and Technologies, Division of Health Sciences, Warwick Medical School, University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL, UK. P.A.Sutcliffe@warwick.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Paul
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Sutcliffe
authors.affiliation: Communicable Disease Control Epidemiology and Evidence, Populations, Evidence and Technologies, Division of Health Sciences, Warwick Medical School, University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL, UK. N.D.McCarthy@warwick.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Noel
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: McCarthy
mesh_terms: D000288:Administrative Personnel; D003362:Cost-Benefit Analysis; D003657:Decision Making; D004196:Disease Outbreaks; D019317:Evidence-Based Medicine; D006801:Humans; D012107:Research Design; D012196:Review Literature as Topic; D013673:Technology Assessment, Biomedical