Up-to-dateness of reviews is often neglected in overviews: a systematic review

Ref ID 611
First Author D. Pieper
Journal JOURNAL OF CLINICAL EPIDEMIOLOGY
Year Of Publishing 2014
URL https://www.jclinepi.com/article/S0895-4356(14)00340-0/pdf
Keywords • General medical
• Currency
• Searching
Problem(s) • Outdated searches
Article Type Empirical
Article Subtype Cross-sectional survey/Methodological systematic review
First Author Country Germany
Aim To assess whether authors of overviews additionally searched for primary studies and the publication lag (date of the overview: date of the review) in overviews indexed across seven databases up to November 2012.
Level of Investigation Descriptive
Summary of Findings More than one-third of the included reviews in the 147 overviews examined were older than 5 years, indicating a high risk of being not up-to-date. Up-to-dateness of reviews was only considered in every fourth review based on analysis of 147 included overviews.
Number of systematic reviews included 147
Number of eligible systematic reviews assessed 5103
Treatment impacted No
Treatment impacted description
Interpretation impacted Not Applicable
Interpretation impacted description