Introduction: Systematic review methods are now being used for reviews of food production, food safety and security, plant health, and animal health and welfare. Information retrieval methods in this context have been informed by human health-care approaches and ideally should be based on relevant research and experience. Objective: This narrative…

In meta-analysis, the random-effects model is often used to account for heterogeneity. The model assumes that heterogeneity has an additive effect on the variance of effect sizes. An alternative model, which assumes multiplicative heterogeneity, has been little used in the medical statistics community, but is widely used by particle physicists. In…

Introduction: Previous studies suggest that many systematic reviews contain meta-analyses that display temporal trends, such as the first study's result being more extreme than later studies' or a drift in the pooled estimate. We assessed the extent and characteristics of temporal trends using all Cochrane intervention reports published 2008-2012.…

Machine learning (ML) algorithms have proven highly accurate for identifying Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) but are not used much in practice, in part because the best way to make use of the technology in a typical workflow is unclear. In this work, we evaluate ML models for RCT classification (support vector machines, convolutional neural…

When the Medical Library Association identified questions critical for the future of the profession, it assigned groups to use systematic reviews to find the answers to these questions. Group 6, whose question was on emerging technologies, recognized early on that the systematic review process would not work well for this question, which looks…

There is ongoing interest in including grey literature in systematic reviews. Including grey literature can broaden the scope to more relevant studies, thereby providing a more complete view of available evidence. Searching for grey literature can be challenging despite greater access through the Internet, search engines and online bibliographic…

A complete description of the literature search, including the criteria used for the inclusion of reports after they have been located, used in a research synthesis or meta-analysis is critical if subsequent researchers are to accurately evaluate and reproduce a synthesis' methods and results. Based on previous guidelines and new suggestions, we…

Driven by necessity in our own complex review, we developed alternative systematic ways of identifying relevant evidence where the key concepts are generally not focal to the primary studies' aims and are found across multiple disciplines--that is, hard-to-detect evidence. Specifically, we sought to identify evidence on community engagement in…

Background: It is unclear which terms should be included in bibliographic searches for randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of drugs, and identifying relevant drug terms can be extremely laborious. The aim of our analysis was to determine whether a bibliographic search using only the generic drug name produces sufficient results for the generation…

Background: When literature searching for systematic reviews, it is good practice to search widely across different information sources. Little is known about the contributions of different publication formats (e.g. journal article and book chapter) and sources, especially for studies of people's views. Method: Studies from four reviews spanning…

Background: The scoping review has become an increasingly popular approach for synthesizing research evidence. It is a relatively new approach for which a universal study definition or definitive procedure has not been established. The purpose of this scoping review was to provide an overview of scoping reviews in the literature. Methods: A…