How researchers can improve the quality of systematic reviews

Talking to Cochrane Australia’s Matt Page about the overproduction of systematic reviews and meta-analyses

Originally published at Nature Index, September 2019

Matthew Page, a research fellow in the School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine at Monash University in Australia, is interested in the biases that affect research and its reporting.

Through his work with Cochrane, an international non-profit network of healthcare researchers with a focus on evidence-based medicine, he’s investigating the transparency and reproducibility of systematic reviews.

A systematic review uses clearly defined and reproducible methods to identify and synthesize the results of studies on a particular topic, such as the spread of Zika virus.

They are often considered to be the strongest form of scientific evidence because they offer increased statistical power and more precise results, and can resolve conflicting results across studies.

However, in 2016, John Ioannidis, a physician researcher at Stanford University, raised concerns about the overproduction of systematic reviews.

Many, he argued, were of poor quality. It’s often unclear how the authors decided which studies to include, and there’s a lot of redundancy, with multiple reviews covering the same ground, Ioannidis wrote.

Are these concerns valid? And if so, what can be done to improve the credibility of systematic reviews? Page shares his thoughts with Nature Index.

Continue reading at Nature Index