New initiative to make systematic review protocols more transparent

The first global initiative to improve the transparency of systematic reviews was launched this week, with a website encouraging researchers to prospectively register study protocols.

The website, PROSPERO, is the first open access online facility to enable researchers planning to conduct systematic reviews to register their protocols in advance, setting out the criteria they will use to gather, analyse, and report evidence.

Systematic reviews are widely accepted as providing the best quality evidence to support decision making in health and social care because they provide the most reliable estimates of the effects of interventions. But there have been growing concerns, and examples, of systematic reviews being selective about what they report, and of unintended duplication of effort.

“PROSPERO was conceived to …