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Automation in systematic reviews

Series Editor: Professor Joseph Lau

Systematic Reviews invites you to submit to our new thematic series, ‘Automation in systematic reviews’.

Systematic reviews have become the foundation of evidence-based practice. Conducting a systematic review is largely a manual process that requires much expertise, time and money. Major advances have been made in the past two decades to improve the methodologies so that systematic reviews are more reliable, though these rigorous new standards add to the time and costs needed to produce high quality reviews. As the demands for systematic reviews increase, there is a need to lower the costs and reduce the time needed to produce them. Until recently, little has been done to improve the efficiency of the systematic review process and to use the computer in innovative ways to make systematic reviews more efficient to produce and useful.

Computers have been used routinely in various steps of a systematic review, such as searching the literature, collecting data with a spreadsheet, maintaining list of studies in a database program, and drafting the reports with a word processor. However, such uses have not taken advantage of advances in new computer technologies that could automate large parts of the systematic review process to significantly improve the efficiency of the process, and the quality and usefulness of the systematic reviews.

In this series, the Editors invite authors to submit articles about innovative uses of computer technologies in producing systematic reviews. These could include, but are not limited to, discussions on the tools and sciences to automate various aspects of the systematic review processes. We are also interested in papers on making systematic reviews computable.

Manuscripts should be formatted according to our submission guidelines and submitted via the online submission system. In the submission system please make sure the correct collection title is chosen on the additional information tab. Please also indicate clearly in the covering letter that the manuscript is to be considered for the ‘Automation in systematic reviews’ series.

For further information, please use the contact us email on the journal website.

  1. The third meeting of the International Collaboration for Automation of Systematic Reviews (ICASR) was held 17–18 October 2017 in London, England. ICASR is an interdisciplinary group whose goal is to maximize t...

    Authors: Annette M. O’Connor, Guy Tsafnat, Stephen B. Gilbert, Kristina A. Thayer, Ian Shemilt, James Thomas, Paul Glasziou and Mary S. Wolfe
    Citation: Systematic Reviews 2019 8:57