Rapid reviews drive us crazy!

Abstract

Objective: Rapid Reviews (RR) are increasingly being used by clinicians, policy makers and healthcare decision makers, and are becoming a more significant resource for health policy, and to identify evidence gaps. RR definitions, methods, and applications are numerous and also vary substantially. There is no a clear definition so it’s possible to get RR explained as “a type of systematic review in which components of the Systematic Review (SR) process are simplified, omitted or made more efficient in order to produce information in a shorter period of time, preferably with minimal impact on quality”, as well as “a type of knowledge synthesis in which components of the SR process are simplified or omitted to produce information in a short period of time”, among many others. Furthermore, there are several types of RR, and there is either no agreement on that. Our main is to compile and review the wide vary of methods and types of RR that are available in the literature, and try to analyse the value of each one focusing on the information specialist role. Methods / Description: In order to achieve that, we selected some of the main institutions or agencies (AHRQ, CADTH, KCE, WHO...) who have publicly available their methods about this area. We checked the different recommendations and searched for some basic elements of special interest as, for instance, the presence of protocol, time or development, number or researchers, information specialist as member of the team, databases searched, etc. Results: Despite the large and assorted amount of RR, it seems that there are also some common points: they should assure high quality bearing a special relevance to the transparency of methods, as well as the importance of engagement or the recommendation of counting on the collaboration of information specialists to perform these kind of studies. Additionally, they all agree that a RR should be performed in less time than a systematic review. On the other hand, there are significant differences on how to abbreviate processes: limiting search strategies by database, by dates, updating literature search of previous reviews, excluding assessment of the quality of included studies, or the type or factors to consider contextual factors affecting the studies. In brief, there is no accordance within the different typologies of RR, in the time that should be spent for their production, or in the recommendation to use text mining, among many others. The short-term expectations seem to be similar, and new RR recommendations are already being announced (e.g. from Cochrane). Summarizing, the current landscape of RR is quite chaotic, and there’re lot of discrepancies between methods, and no consistency or agreement amount producers. It would be recommendable to work on a consistency and uniformity of this kind of documents, in order to make easier basic aspects for the reporting and the quality assessment of RR.