Editorial: Systematic review automation thematic series

Excerpt

It has been over 35 years since health disciplines adopted systematic reviews and meta-analyses to inform healthcare decisions and policies. Advances in methodology and creation of standards have improved the reliability and consistency of these syntheses of research findings. Conducting a systematic review involves complex processes usually requiring many tedious steps and numerous hours of expert labor. A typical systematic review can take a team of researchers a year or more to produce [1]. Systematic reviews are costly. The cost varies according to the number of questions to answer and the amount of literature to evaluate. For instance, an Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality comparative effectiveness review with five key questions and the need to review about 10,000 citations may cost upward of US$300,000. …