Up-to-dateness of reviews is often neglected in overviews: a systematic review

open access

 1. Introduction

What is new?

Key findings

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The mean publication lag per review was more than 5 years.

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Only one in four overviews considered up-to-dateness.

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No overview systematically investigated whether an update was necessary.

What this adds to what was known?

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This is the first systematic analysis of up-to-dateness in overviews.

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We developed recommendations to produce up-to-date overviews.

What is the implication and what should change now?

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Authors should analyze whether the underlying evidence of systematic reviews (SRs) is still up-to-date when conducting overviews.

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Authors should search for primary studies not included in SRs, if needed

Keeping current with the scientific literature is a very challenging task for researchers but even more so for health professionals as the amount of published literature in medical science is rapidly rising. Eleven systematic reviews (SRs) and 75 trials need to be read every day to keep up-to-date, when just considering the publications listed in MEDLINE [1].

This huge amount of literature has led reviewers to perform evidence syntheses on reviews instead of primary studies that are often called overviews (of reviews), review of reviews, and umbrella reviews [2]........