Abstract
Objectives
As part of an effort to develop an extension of the Preferred Reporting Items for
Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) 2020 statement for living systematic
reviews (LSRs), we discuss conceptual issues relevant to the reporting of LSRs and
highlight a few challenges.
Methods
Discussion of conceptual issues based on a scoping review of the literature and discussions
among authors.
Results
We first briefly describe aspects of the LSR production process relevant to reporting.
The production cycles differ by whether the literature surveillance identifies new
evidence and whether newly identified evidence is judged to be consequential. This
impacts the timing, content, and format of LSR versions. Second, we discuss four types
of information that are specific to the reporting of LSRs: justification for adopting
the living mode, LSR specific methods, changes between LSR versions, and LSR updating
status. We also discuss the challenge of conveying changes between versions to the
reader. Third, we describe two commonly used reporting formats of LSRs: full and partial
reports. Although partial reports are easier to produce and publish, they lead to
the scattering of information across different versions. Full reports ensure the completeness
of reporting. We discuss the implications for the extension of the PRISMA 2020 statement
for LSRs.
Conclusion
We argue that a dynamic publication platform would facilitate complete and timely
reporting of LSRs.
Keywords
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Article info
Publication history
Published online: February 01, 2023
Accepted:
January 26,
2023
Footnotes
Conflicts of interest: The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this article.
Data statement: Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analyzed during the current study.
Funding: This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
Author Contributions: EAA conceptualized the paper, EAA and JK designed the paper. All authors contributed to the content and structure of the paper. JK and EAA wrote the first draft of the manuscript. All authors critically revised the manuscript and approved the final version.
Identification
Copyright
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