Overview authors rarely defined systematic reviews that are included in their overviews

Ref ID 367
First Author C. M. Faggion Jr
Journal JOURNAL OF CLINICAL EPIDEMIOLOGY
Year Of Publishing 2019
URL https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30684566/
Keywords • Overviews/Umbrella Reviews
• Low reporting quality
• General medical
Problem(s) • Lack of guidance or consistency in systematic overview / umbrella / review of systematic reviews
• Individual study characteristics not reported sufficiently
• Intervention not described / defined
Article Type Empirical
Article Subtype Cross-sectional survey/Methodological systematic review
First Author Country Germany
Aim To assess systematic review definitions that are published in overviews of systematic reviews, published in the medical literature between November 2017 and May 2018.
Level of Investigation Descriptive
Summary of Findings Only 8% of overviews explicitly reported a systematic review definition, whereas 24% of overviews reported heterogeneous information about the criteria that were used to include systematic reviews in the overviews. 68% of overviews did not report any definition/criteria for including a systematic review. 2% of overviews reported a definition based on reproducibility, and none of the overviews reported the need to search for grey and unpublished literature for a review to be considered systematic.
Number of systematic reviews included 105
Number of eligible systematic reviews assessed 138