Chapter 24 – Future for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis

Shah Ebrahim, Mark D. Huffman

Abstract

The demand for and supply of systematic reviews and meta-analyses are booming, yet this growth threatens the sustainability and growth of both. The volume and complexity of science continue to expand exponentially, competition and duplication are rampant, and standards of reporting have led to greater detail without necessarily greater clarity of systematic review reports. As agencies that gain from systematic reviews, private, governmental, nonprofit, and professional organizations should invest more in systematic reviews. The future of systematic reviews will include access to an even greater amount of information for synthesis, including unpublished and regulatory data, which will require technology to manage. For example, top-down informatics approaches will be complemented by bottom-up crowdsourcing from the scientific community. Priorities will need to balance the competing demands of systematic review teams and end users. Systematic reviews may even extend into basic and translational sciences, with a long-term goal of improving the quality and efficiency of primary research.

Corrections

Page 470 Section 24.6.1: The third sentence of the last paragraph should read “One-third of
trial reports typically performed by two reviewers could thus be assessed by a single reviewer“.

Page 478: Refercne 32. should read Coady, S.A., Mensah, G.A., Wagner, E.L., Goldfarb, M.E., Hitchcock, D.M., Giffen, C.A. (2017). Use of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute Data Repository. N Engl J Med. 376: 1849-1858.

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Author affiliations

Shah Ebrahim

Coordinating Editor, Cochrane Heart Group (1995-2014)
London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, University of London, London, UK

Mark D. Huffman

Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago, IL, USA
The George Institute for Global Health, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

How to cite this chapter?

For the printed version of the book

Ebrahim, S. and Huffman, M.D. (2022). Chapter 24. Future for systematic reviews and meta-analysis. In: Systematic Reviews in Health Research: Meta-analysis in Context (eds M. Egger, J.P.T. Higgins and G. Davey Smith), pp 463-479. Hoboken, NJ : Wiley.