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