Article type
Year
Abstract
Background:
Living systematic reviews - online summaries of healthcare research that are updated as new research becomes available - are an attractive but largely untested answer to bridging the trade-off between systematic review currency and quality. Within the context of an international research project in traumatic brain injury (TBI), we have been trialling novel review methods, with a view to creating a suite of living systematic reviews in TBI.
Objectives:
To develop and sustain an international TBI knowledge community that maintains up-to-date, high quality living systematic reviews of the current state of knowledge in the most important questions in TBI.
Methods:
Teams of novice reviewers, supported by expert advisory panels and review methodologists, will be responsible for the creation of a suite of reviews on prioritized TBI topics. Online review workflow tools will facilitate the delegation of micro tasks (e.g. small amounts of screening, data extraction and critical appraisal) to dispersed groups of author teams as new studies are identified through frequent search updates. We will experiment with novel publication methods across interactive websites and traditional journals to allow the continual integration of new studies with the original review findings. Novel participation methods may be explored over time, as the project facilitates the use of large and evolving authorship teams, including expert crowdsourcing.
Results:
We have convened a ‘knowledge commons’ to oversee the project and commenced author training. We will report on the success of the remainder of the project against planned objectives.
Conclusions:
Truly living systematic reviews offer exciting possibilities for real-time knowledge translation products that build on systematic review evidence. Future project stages include integration of review findings with ‘living’ clinical practice guidance that feed into ‘living’ clinical decision support systems, involving a world-wide expert community, and bridging current temporal disconnects between evidence, guidelines and practice.
Living systematic reviews - online summaries of healthcare research that are updated as new research becomes available - are an attractive but largely untested answer to bridging the trade-off between systematic review currency and quality. Within the context of an international research project in traumatic brain injury (TBI), we have been trialling novel review methods, with a view to creating a suite of living systematic reviews in TBI.
Objectives:
To develop and sustain an international TBI knowledge community that maintains up-to-date, high quality living systematic reviews of the current state of knowledge in the most important questions in TBI.
Methods:
Teams of novice reviewers, supported by expert advisory panels and review methodologists, will be responsible for the creation of a suite of reviews on prioritized TBI topics. Online review workflow tools will facilitate the delegation of micro tasks (e.g. small amounts of screening, data extraction and critical appraisal) to dispersed groups of author teams as new studies are identified through frequent search updates. We will experiment with novel publication methods across interactive websites and traditional journals to allow the continual integration of new studies with the original review findings. Novel participation methods may be explored over time, as the project facilitates the use of large and evolving authorship teams, including expert crowdsourcing.
Results:
We have convened a ‘knowledge commons’ to oversee the project and commenced author training. We will report on the success of the remainder of the project against planned objectives.
Conclusions:
Truly living systematic reviews offer exciting possibilities for real-time knowledge translation products that build on systematic review evidence. Future project stages include integration of review findings with ‘living’ clinical practice guidance that feed into ‘living’ clinical decision support systems, involving a world-wide expert community, and bridging current temporal disconnects between evidence, guidelines and practice.