Paper – Systematic Reviewlution

Keywords	• General medical • Low reporting quality
Problem(s)	• Individual study characteristics not reported sufficiently
Article Type	Empirical
Article Subtype	Cross-sectional survey/Methodological systematic review
First Author Country	Germany
Aim	To assess non-Cochrane update systematic reviews and their reporting characteristics retrieved from PubMed between 2016-2018.
Level of Investigation	Descriptive
Summary of Findings	From 100 included systematic reviews: the number of newly included studies and participants and the number of studies and participants included from the previous systematic review were often not reported. Only 51/100 systematic review updates used the term “update” in the title and none reported having based the decision to update the previous systematic review on an existing method/decision tool.
Number of systematic reviews included	100
Number of eligible systematic reviews assessed	2644
Treatment impacted	No
Treatment impacted description
Interpretation impacted	Not Applicable
Interpretation impacted description

Does the article have a publicly available protocol?	Yes
Did the review team include both methodological and clinical experts?	Not Applicable
Sampling strategy for obtaining the systematic reviews under assessment	Random
Was the sample size of systematic reviews subject to any formal sample size or power calculation?	No
Were any or all of the study selection and data extraction performed in duplicate?	Yes
Were any statistical adjustments made to correct for confounding?	Not Applicable
Are the methods of the article described in enough detail to replicate the study?	Yes