Are systematic reviews up-to-date at the time of publication?

Ref ID 513
First Author E. M. Beller
Journal SYSTEMATIC REVIEWS
Year Of Publishing 2013
URL https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23714302/
Keywords • General medical
• Currency
• Searching
• Low reporting quality
• Transparency
Problem(s) • Outdated searches
• Insufficient literature searches
Article Type Empirical
Article Subtype Cross-sectional survey/Methodological systematic review
First Author Country Australia
Aim To assess the recency and other characteristics of systematic reviews published in the National Library of Medicine’s Core Clinical Journals indexed in MEDLINE between 2009-2011 at the time of their publication, as measured by the time from last search date to publication.
Level of Investigation Descriptive
Summary of Findings 90% of included reviews provided the date of search in the full-text article.11.3% of searches in the included reviews were conducted on only one database. Another six 2.0% of articles did not mention how many databases had been searched.
Number of systematic reviews included 300
Number of eligible systematic reviews assessed 860
Treatment impacted No
Treatment impacted description
Interpretation impacted Not Applicable
Interpretation impacted description