Why Does the Reproducibility of Search Strategies and Search Results in Systematic Reviews Reduce Over Time? What We Can Do About It?

Farhad
8 min readDec 6, 2023
Reproducibility and Replicability
Reproducibility and Replicability. Source: Turing Way: https://the-turing-way.netlify.app/

There is no excuse; we MUST do our best to report the search methods as reproducible as possible. But what is reproducibility?

In my previous paper titled “Reproducibility and Replicability of Systematic Reviews”, I used the following definition that seems to be still relevant:

Reproducibility is re-conducting the same study, using the same methods and data by a different researcher or team, and replicability is re-doing the same study to gather new data or recollect the data (Patil et al. 2016).

Are Systematic Reviews, Research Studies or Only Literature Reviews?

Some methodologists argue that a systematic review is not a research study but a review, just like any narrative literature review, and we should distinguish review from research. Unlike narrative literature reviews, systematic reviews follow a detailed research question and pre-set protocol involving at least three people. However, one might claim that even narrative reviews can have those properties. What differentiates systematic review from narrative review is Reproducibility.

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Farhad

An Evidence Scientist with a Pinch of Career and Life Lessons