No, of course, the systematic review/meta-analysis hasn’t died. But I kind of wish the flag-waving for the claim that its current form should die, would.
Before we go any further, I am not waving the flag for systematic reviews being so special, nothing about them should ever change. And I don’t think anyone would argue any more that just because something is, or calls itself, a systematic review that it’s necessarily good evidence. Every systematic method isn’t a good way to review evidence, either. Some are even truly egregious, and the straws people grasp at to make evidence synthesis easier can be, well, quite breathtaking. Exhibit A:
The genre of dissing systematic reviews is getting truly extreme, though. In
my last post, I tackled John Ioannidis’ claim that only 3% of systematic reviews are both “decent” and “clinically useful”. To be very clear, he at least was only arguing for
a gradual transition to a new way of tackling evidence in health care. He argues for moving away from meta-analyzing retrospectively, and doing primary research in the context of prospective meta-analysis.
