The automation of systematic reviews

Would lead to best currently available evidence at the push of a button The Cochrane handbook stipulates that systematic reviews should be examined every two years and updated if needed,1 but time and resource constraints mean that this occurs for only a third of reviews.2 Indeed, it may take as much time to update a review as it did to produce the original review. If this effort were redirected at developing methods to automate reviews, then updating might one day become almost effortless, immediate, and universal. In his novel Player Piano , Kurt Vonnegut Jr described machines that record the hand motions of artisans and replay them to reproduce a perfect copy of the artefact, more quickly and more economically. Such automation is needed in the update and even creation of systematic reviews, because the capability of the human machinery for review increasingly lags behind our capacity to produce primary evidence.3 The current reality is that many reviews are missing or outdated,4 and it is hard to imagine a solution that does not involve some automation.5 Technology has advanced such that software can be used …