The influence of the team in conducting a systematic review

Abstract

There is an increasing body of research documenting flaws in many published systematic reviews’ methodological and reporting conduct. When good systematic review practice is questioned, attention is rarely turned to the composition of the team that conducted the systematic review. This commentary highlights a number of relevant articles indicating how the composition of the review team could jeopardise the integrity of the systematic review study and its conclusions. Key biases require closer attention such as sponsorship bias and researcher allegiance, but there may also be less obvious affiliations in teams conducting secondary evidence-syntheses. The importance of transparency and disclosure are now firmly on the agenda for clinical trials and primary research, but the meta-biases that systematic reviews may be at risk from now require further scrutiny.

Etapas na Condução de uma Revisão Sistemática

“…Isto significa que vai acabar com uma grande quantidade de referências, muitas vezes mais de mil de referências, sendo que uma elevada percentagem dessas referências será provavelmente irrelevante. 7 Como já foi mencionado, a estrutura PICO é a forma mais comum de formular uma pergunta para investigação, mas geralmente na pesquisa não se incluem todas as partes da questão PICO, o foco deverá ser na população e na intervenção.…”

“…Verificar as referências dos artigos seleccionados pode consumir muito tempo mas acrescenta eficácia à revisão e habitualmente ajuda a identificar trabalhos relevantes adicionais que não foram recuperados na pesquisa online. 7 Por vezes pela análise de citação, isto é uma análise de que artigos citaram um mais antigo, mas ainda relevante para o estudo, também pode ser relevante. Para esta análise existem bases de dados como a Web of Science e a SCOPUS que nos podem indicar quais são os artigos mais citados pelos artigos incluídos no nosso trabalho.…”

Introduction to the Special Issue on Child Welfare Literature Reviews: Literature Reviews, Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses—How Can Child Welfare Administrators, Practitioners and Researchers Determine What We Know?

“…Even when they are based on a search, this approach is problematic for a number of reasons, including variations in what is required to achieve effective status on each list; selective outcome reporting in primary studies (i.e., only some outcomes are reported rather than all of the outcomes that were measured; Dwan et al, 2010;Norris et al, 2012); conflicts of interest and other biases that might be influencing findings (Gorman, 2016); an apparent inability to remove programs from the list even in the presence of evidence that an intervention is not effective (Gorman, 2015); and the major problem of replicability of findings for a large number of randomized controlled trials (Collaboration, 2015). Systematic reviews, while they still have the potential to carry bias (Uttley & Montgomery, 2017), are the most promising method for keeping known sources of bias to a minimum and, at the very least, are fully transparent, living documents that allow practitioners and policy-makers to easily access current best evidence when making critical decisions.…”

Invited commentary—WHO Classification of Tumours: How should tumors be classified? Expert consensus, systematic reviews or both?

“…Systematic reviews require training in methods, as well as expertise. [8][9][10] They can be laborious to complete, timeconsuming and difficult to interpret, particularly when there is a lot of evidence, or when the evidence is low-grade. Systematic review methods have been described as being formulaic.…”

“…20 Managing the influence and expertise of team members in systematic reviews, like nonsystematic reviews, remains critical to producing reliable and externally valid conclusions. 10 Although essential for the synthesis of available scientific evidence in controversial questions, it is clear that systematic review methods would need to be adapted to the specific needs of the WHO Classification of Tumours and its editorial process. Timely procurement of a valid evaluation of evidence is one of the major problems for process-driven systems such as the WHO Classification of Tumours, and this is something that traditional, comprehensive systematic reviews struggle to provide.…”