The Pandora’s Box of Evidence Synthesis and the case for a living Evidence Synthesis Taxonomy
Zachary Munn, Danielle Pollock, Timothy Hugh Barker, Jennifer Stone, Cindy Stern, Edoardo Aromataris, Holger J. Schünemann, Barbara Clyne, Hanan Khalil, Reem A. Mustafa, Christina Godfrey, Andrew Booth, Andrea C. Tricco, Alan Pearson
Abstract
Have we, as an evidence-based health community, opened the Pandora's box of evidence synthesis? There now exists a plethora of overlapping evidence synthesis approaches and duplicate, redundant and poor-quality reviews.1-4 After years of advocating for the need for systematic reviews of the evidence, there is a risk that this message been disseminated too widely and has been misinterpreted in this process. We have reached a point where in some fields more reviews exist than clinical trials, where same topic reviews are being conducted in parallel, and evidence syntheses possess limited utility for decision-making because of their poor quality or poor reporting.To paraphrase the late Douglas Altman,5 it is possible we are now at a stage where we need less reviews, better reviews and reviews done for the right reason - as opposed to the current state of mass production (approximately 80 reviews per day)6.