Opinion Exploring duplication in reviews of Long COVID: 2020-2023, 2026, Raine et al

forestglip

forestglip

Moderator
Staff member
Exploring duplication in reviews of Long COVID: 2020-2023

Gary Austin Raine; Claire Loise Khouja

Background
The unnecessary duplication of reviews is a recognised problem in the field of evidence synthesis. This paper reports findings from a study exploring potential duplication of effort in reviews on the frequency and/or risk of Long COVID that were published during the first three years of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Methods
We extracted and summarised the aims and key characteristics of 112 reviews identified from five published evidence summaries commissioned by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) for the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), England, which covered the period from January 2020 to January 2023.

Results
There was significant similarity in the aims and characteristics of the 112 reviews. We identified 43 reviews reporting on any persistent symptoms/effects and 69 that focused on specific symptoms/effects; overlap in the conditions studied was common.

The majority of reviews focused on individuals of any age (n=62); where restrictions were applied (n=50), all but six reviews focused on adults. Most reviews focused on both hospitalised and non-hospitalised patients (n=97) and authors searched the same time periods. Half of authors reported publishing a protocol prospectively (n=58) and only a minority received specific review funding (n=39).

Conclusions
Our findings raise concerns about unnecessary duplication of effort and the extent to which all reviews we assessed will have added substantially to the Long COVID evidence base.

Researchers should seek to minimise research redundancy and only conduct new reviews when a genuine knowledge gap exists.

Web | Centre for Reviews and Dissemination
 
Last edited:
Yeah, it's a big problem. I am very certain that there aren't 100 papers worth a damn on LC, so that would be more reviews than useful papers. But what is going to stop it? This is mainly a problem with illnesses that are believed to be psychological, so this is just the tip of a very large iceberg, but there is no authority that can deal with this, no incentive to reduce, no one can ever do wrong by duplicating prior work. It just keeps plowing mindlessly, because it was already plowing mindlessly before anyone currently working in this discipline began their education.

This problem even hides the real problem. Most of those reviews ignore the vast majority of papers, it's the nature of how reviews are made, and it's wrong because it hides the fact that the vast majority of studies aren't even worth reviewing, and that includes a lot of people who do both reviews and studies/trials, who too often mostly cherry-pick studies they took part of. The vast majority of biopsychosocial studies have no merit, and it's even worse with trials, which is just a system of copy-and-pasting-and-pasting-and-pasting...-and-pasting.

This simply derives from the unaddressed crisis in psychology. All of this only happens when psychology is the primary goal. This is a problem with psychology itself, its methodologies, and how it can't seem to stop doing useless work.

Something I thought the other day, but I would really like for someone to do a study of how long CBT has been promising. It's been 'promising' for decades, and that promise hasn't budged. Hundreds and hundreds, likely thousands, of studies and papers and trials all about the 'promise' of something that has never actually delivered, something made clear by the fact that it's still described as promising in every single paper published about it, and how more of the exact same research should be done.

This is a much bigger problem. The whole system is stuck in a loop of redundant nonsense. It's all chaff and no wheat.

And then you have to consider the fact that new reviews keep popping up, and yet Cochrane bizarrely/falsely argued that they stopped their own correction of their own review because nothing new has happened since, which isn't even relevant to the fact that the review is fatally flawed. The only future of biopsychosocial ideology is to be a giant historical mistake. It has revealed itself to be the one of the most harmful and inefficient ideology in history, and no one with influence is willing to even say it, no matter how evident it is.
 
Part of the reason so many reviews have seemed to be necessary is just how bad the science has been and how difficult it has been to find any findings at all. Starting from the premise of ignoring the existence of ME/CFS and some of the better rules around patient selection and how patients should be handled and assessed has meant a lot of ignorant papers were put out that just don't move our understanding forward.

The waste isn't the reviews, they are symptom of the setting on fire of money that was all the terrible Long Covid studies that knew nothing about chronic illness and shed little to no enlightenment on it.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom