Interesting, I think as any other area of research, replicability is an important part of evidence based medicine. Having different systematic reviews on the same topic with the same conclusion is in favor of this. However, and it is maybe because my field of research is not as developed as traditional medical field (ie veterinary studies), it is important to mention that one of the challenge we have is on the assessment ot ROB and to GRADE the evidence that is gathered. Most of time, the authors used modified ROB tools with little or no reliability assessment which makes the conclusion less robust.

There is also a trend to end up with a forest plot and meta-analysis. However, when few studies are available it is always important to be sure that this pooled estimate is meaningful. Therefore I can see the added value of >1 systematic review on a topic.

I have been noticing the same thing. These systematic reviews appear to contribute something but really do not constitute new research or even replication of existing research. Systematic reviews can be conducted endlessly if you wish to make a point other than contributing to new research of a subject. Perhaps this can be used in a subtle way to influence opinion?

In my opinion, if the research question requires a systematic review/meta-analyses, the author can perform by applying scientific approaches eg., PRISM approach. If it is scientifically done, it may contribute to the research community. To avoid the repetitive unscientific meta papers, authors should use the guidelines for it or the peer review process should make the authors to do well before publishing.

Durgesh Nandhini You raises the question of quality--andfor sure, systematic reviews and meta-analyses should follow the PRISMA guidelines. Even there, what is often lacking is a way of integrating quality of the included studies and their findings. A Risk of Bias bias assessment is almost always included, but we need a better way to integrate the risk of bias--a measure of the strength or trustworthiness of the data--with the findings. Too often, weak studies with high RoB data are included yet their findings are not weighted in some fashion to reflect this poor quality, leading to misleading conclusions what what is actually known and what sort of recommendations can/should be made. BUT--my primary concern here is the over-production of such papers in the absence of a good scientific rationale. They have a useful to play, but we should always be able to provide a good answer to the question, "What is the scientific contribution of this paper?"

Thank you so much your comment sir. ofcourse, there is a need of empirical or scientific researches but on the other hand meta studies also increasing. There are no specific recommendations from my side sir.

1/5

"Systematic Reviews" deceit or ignorance? Only.

Sometimes valuable discussions are initiated here, that go beyond personal needs, interests and profits. This is one of them. There are many questions and discussions about systematic reviews. As far as I have seen, all they want is about how to do it, how to find related literature, where to search, lack of literature, abundance of literature, where to publish it... and the like.

But this discussion triggered me that I talk about issues regarding systematic reviews, that have occupied my mind.

Regarding this;

Is it just me, or is the number of systematic reviews and meta-analyses increasing dramatically?

The second part of your statement has become a world hot trend in academia. Why? if somebody asks!

Upon investigations, we see all the roots go to that nasty slogan "publish or perish"!

Now it is a propaganda that circulate 24/7 in the mind of many, specifically a university management then surfaces in all the academia and all over the world.

Now these are the norms, how can I have more published items? how to publish in Q1? how to find collaborators? Few people could be found that work in universities and don't think of more publications.

To be short, all of us know that more published items are translated into more revenue, promotions, tenure. So many of those faculty members around the world, see "systematic reviews" as a potential publishable paper.

But should not we, in academia, see if a phenomenon is feasible? then think of other things related to it! I argue that it is impossible to do a systematic review. Therefore I think emergence of systematic reviews are the results of deceit or ignorance, but its prevalence all over the world is another story. Why not talk about them in details?

End of 1/5

• The scientist must be brave enough to question and criticize anything his teachers or his society may tell him, at the risk of ostracism, denial of financial support, or worse. Only in this way can a scientist hope to make a positive contribution to his subject. (Stephen G. Brush, 1974)

10.1126/science.183.4130.1164

2/5

The problem is this word "all"

Maybe problem of "Systematic Reviews" started from what we read below:

"In a 1753 example of what we might now call a systematic review, James Lind, in his treatise on scurvy, presented a ‘Critical and Chronological View of what has been published on the subject’. He wrote ‘It became requisite to exhibit a full and impartial view of what had hitherto been published on the scurvy’ and ‘before the subject could be set in a clear and proper light, it was necessary to remove a great deal of rubbish’. This uncovering of rubbish research continues to be an important role for systematic reviews, not least in demonstrating the enormous amount of research waste caused by poor quality studies." (1).

Now we see articles like this:

· Systematic reviews, as the name implies, typically involve a detailed and comprehensive plan and search strategy derived a priori, with the goal of reducing bias by identifying, appraising, and synthesizing all relevant studies on a particular topic. (2).

Or this one

· Similar to all SRs [systematic reviews], the core components of SRs of CPGs include a precise clinical question, a reproducible search strategy that aims to identify all relevant literature, (3)

There are countless articles that specifically address systematic reviews in scholarly literature; that have this word in them "ALL". implicit or explicit means complete.

May be in 1753 (1) it was possible to review all related literature, but certainly not now (even we can question the reliability of the case of 1753 as well). How is it possible to find all relevant literature on a given topic, today? we should ask ourselves.

There are many questions and sub questions that can be asked, such as:

A- Do we have access to all databases that have or should have the related literature?

B- If yes, are we expert searchers (database familiarity, and search strategy) to find and retrieve everything related?

C- What about databases that overlap others? we know that records related to a topic could be subject to more research from different sciences and viewpoints. For example topics related to food could be found in FSTA, Agris, Agricola, CAB, Embase, Medline, ERIC and others...

D- Do we also have access to old, physical (undigitized) literature?

E- Are we aware of related literature in other languages, all languages, all other countries? and also do we have access to them all?

F- How is it possible to draw a mental border for a topic and not to go off it?

G- If yes to all of the above, do we have time to do all of them? for example for physical documents can we travel to other cities, countries to access them? or for other languages, do we have expertise and language ability in all other languages related to the topic subject to systematic review?

This list can be continued for hours.

Finally we should ask ourselves if yes in all the above told conditions (that is completely impossible and out of question) what is the value of a Systematic review?

End of 2/5

1- 10.1136/bmjebm-2018-110968

2- Uman LS. Systematic reviews and meta-analyses. J Can Acad Child Adolesc Psychiatry. 2011 Feb;20(1):57-9.

3- 10.1016/j.jclinepi.2018.11.030

3/5

Lets move to another issue about systematic reviews, that is outnumber or what I call it Redundancy, not only they (systematic reviews) are useless but certainly harmful and even disastrous.

When we look closely at systematic reviews they go through old fashioned bibliometric or scientomentric descriptive methods that don't show us the realty but mislead us (as readers). They go to say, these persons or those persons (as researchers) are the most productive, the same method is used for topics, title of papers, universities, subjects, countries and whatever could be counted.

So in systematic reviews we credit those that don't deserve credit unless we go through inferential scientometrics. To see what was the real story behind a published Item/s (that we use it, them, in systematic reviews).

Lets have a quote from a valuable article from several British scientists

"Authorship problems in scholarly journals: considerations for authors, peer reviewers and editors" DOI 10.1007/s00296-012-2582-2

we read, "Incorrect interpretation of an author’s publication record in online databases, his/ her h index and other citation metrics displayed on Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar in the instances of multiple authorship causes undue crediting of authors, obtaining research funds, taking academic posts, abusing power and unethically co-authoring hundreds, if not thousands of new publications. Even worse, these ‘authors’ get unfair recognition from academia, publishers and journal editors, who invite them to act as reviewers and editors, unintentionally breaching the ethical standards of publishing" Gasparyan, Ayvazyan and Kitas, P.278, 2013).*

Now we can add other problems to what Gasparyan and others found, that is the predatory publishing/journals (PPJs). They publish almost everything, we don't know how peer review work in them (if there is any at all). For example they may publish some 800 papers in just an issue (**). Then they say if you cite it, if you review for us, if you publish with us, you will receive discounts and these motivations and other motivation forms; motivate to publish more in PPJs.

Are they worth to be used in systematic reviews? will they show a consistent overview of what is happening in a field or about a topic? see how misleading is when we combine the findings of Gasparyan et al + PPJs and 3G+H authorship (Gift, Ghost, Guest and Honorary)

I open it more in 4/5

End of 3/5

*https://www.researchgate.net/post/Questionable_but_yet_powerful_phenomena_in_scientific_journals_even_top_ones_is_I_publish_where_I_edit_Obviously_we_can_not_ask_them_why_and_how

**https://www.researchgate.net/post/Comments_papers_how_should_they_be_dealt_with_by_a_Journal