Conference papers may be included in Systematic Reviews of Literature. In what circumstances? Usually SLRs select only articles and reviews because they are peer reviewed papers. Are there cases where this rule does not necessarily have to be respected?
I think that conference papers are an essential part of any bibliography. There is a lot of information in conferences that does not find its way to formal communication. that is, journals. There is no point in loosing this information. The conference papers usually are published in the conference proceedings. There are proceedings that are very important and should be cited, the "Lecture notes in computer science" , for instance, which is conference proceedings in the form of book series, and is cited extensively.
I would like to thank the researchers Avishag Gordon, PhD and Gautam Gulati, FRCPsych FHEA for their contributions to my research work. Many thanks to both. Indeed, conference papers may be required in comprehensive SLRs...
I think this should depend on the topic. In certain situations you need full details about the methodology and variables, more than could be provided in an Abstract or Poster. In other situations all the data you want to extract are available in the abstract , I don't think it is justifiable to excludes them . Moreover you could introduce an element of bias if you exclude abstracts/ posters because of the kind of data in these formats are not included in your review e.g. individual case reports .
I am of the understanding that this area of "grey literature" should NOT be included as part of the data-set of a quality review. Conference abstracts are not peer-reviewed and often the reports are "preliminary" and may change at final publication.. if they get published at all.
I think it is contextual . As a real-life example : I am reviewing a rather rare disease and the individual cases tend to be published in clinical meetings as individual case reports. These reports contain the essential data about each case clinical presentation, lab results and treatment. I don't need more than that. Fewer cases reported are in full papers, usually as case series. If I exclude conference abstracts I would be excluding the majority of cases. I am sure the reviewers will understand ! However I have found it unacceptable in a review that compared different methods of malaria control and quoted conference abstracts . Here we need to scrutinize the data in a way that would not be possible in an abstract.
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