SCHARR Mini Master Class in Health Research - Dr Lesley Uttley - The Problems with Systematic Reviews: a Living Initiative for Research Integrity

Subtitle: How Research Culture is Likely Contributing to Research Waste: Lessons from systematicreviewlution.com

Abstract

Systematic reviews and meta-analyses are seen as the gold standard in evidence based medicine. Systematic Reviewlution (https://systematicreviewlution.com/) is a project funded by the UKRI MRC aimed to understand and document problems with these highly cited and influential articles, which are often being published at a rate that outpaces primary clinical research. This living systematic review has found 485 articles documenting 67 discrete problems relating to the conduct and reporting of published systematic reviews which potentially jeopardises their reliability or validity. A variety of institutional factors are likely fuelling the problems with systematic reviews and these factors are representative of issues affecting the entire evidence ecosystem.

Bio

Lesley Uttley is a Senior Research Fellow at the Sheffield Centre for Health and related Research (SCHARR), University of Sheffield, working in the field of systematic reviews since 2011 with an educational background in Psychology. In 2019 Lesley was awarded a fellowship to investigate the reliability and validity of published systematic reviews by the UK Medical Research Council (MR/T009861/1). Lesley’s work aims to scrutinise and uphold systematic reviews and also to consider how human influences and research culture impact seemingly objective research projects.

References: Uttley, L., Quintana, D. S., Montgomery, P., Carroll, C., Page, M. J., Falzon, L., ... & Moher, D. (2023). The problems with systematic reviews: a living systematic review. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology.