Objectives: To share ad hoc solutions to challenges in producing non-effectiveness systematic reviews.
Description: Increasingly, stakeholders commission research synthesis that relates to a greater variety of types of questions, which requires managing evidence from a mix of study designs and sources. These reviews often need to be done with limited resources, while maintaining quality. Key challenges across this range of reviews include dealing with very large numbers of studies; assessing the confidence in and quality of very different types of evidence and literature; extracting and combining data of different natures or with different reporting formats; and assessing confidence in the findings.
We have tried several approaches to address these challenges, such as negotiating with commissioners of reviews; refocusing research questions; grouping search strategies to facilitate subsequent subdivision of labour; text-mining to accelerate screening of titles and abstracts: limiting independent, double decisions on inclusion and data extraction: standardised templates with automated inclusion decisions and universal data extraction functionality; safeguards to check data consistency, or analytical approaches.
We will select a small number of these challenges and, using concrete examples, will share the solutions implemented. We will invite registered participants to submit their challenges for discussion.