Providing appropriate research evidence is really important for clinical trials as it speaks for their quality, integrity, consistency and reliability. With the abundance of published sources on the Internet, however, keeping up with updated and new research evidence turns into a task too difficult to cope with. This is not surprising, taking into consideration what statistics have shown in the past. Thus, within the second half of the 20th century there were approximately 20,000 journals being published annually along with more than two million articles. Now, during the 21st century when the rapid use of technology impacted healthcare and research too, the figures mentioned above have grown exponentially.
More and more users rely on online sources when they want to find information about a medical condition or clinical studies which aim at providing better cure-finding practices. Why? Because the electronic media grants access to a large amount of information. And people want to be informed. Because of this access, experts try to tackle a major problem – that related to having all sorts of online medical data and insights, both reliable and unreliable as well as clear and unclear. Respectively, there is the challenge which focuses on carrying out systematic reviews which have the primary goal to identify, estimate and sum up relevant findings of individual studies. In addition, such findings will lead to more accessible evidence to people who struggle to make a decision regarding one case or another.
Yet, it’s not just common readers who need good quality information that states out the feasibility, effectiveness, functionality and appropriateness of healthcare treatments and procedures. Healthcare managers, clinicians, nurses, researchers, policy makers, other experts in the field – all of them require well-managed and credible facts too. Because of this, they seek to collect, specify, synthesize and deliver the most appropriate information on hundreds topics on a daily basis. To do that some professionals use traditional review methods but they are surely becoming old-fashioned. They differ from systematic reviews in that may not be as rigorous and are not based on peer-reviewed protocols. So very often, the findings from such reviews cannot be replicated. In the worst case scenario, traditional reviews may not even be bias-free and may include selectively arranged citations and quotes in order to support personal beliefs.
On the contrary, systematic reviews are more likely to help clinical trial personnel and consumers. This particular type of reviews is needed because they
- Establish clinical effectiveness
- Deliver cost- and time-efficacy in term of a pharmaceutical product
- Guarantee for the feasibility of a trial
- Define interventions as culturally and ethically appropriate
- Propose a future study agenda and plans when an existing agenda is somewhat ambiguous when trying to address a specific clinical issue
- Contribute to the assessment process for technology appraisals
- Clarify uncertainties
- Point out what is known about a trial
- Show where there is not enough knowledge
All in all, systematic reviews are conducted when experts want to evaluate, summarise or define the findings of individual studies. They even try to group together the outcomes of multiple researches as it provides with more reliable, exact and thorough calculation of the efficacy and usefulness of a trial. Finally, all successful systematic reviews follow very strict and precise scientific designs which are built on approved methods.
