In this blog, Xuenan Pang, a PhD student with Evidence Synthesis Ireland at the University of Galway, outlines helpful tips for creating and enhancing a search strategy for evidence synthesis. A comprehensive search underpins all subsequent stages of evidence synthesis. Designing an effective search strategy can be challenging, and many published reviews include suboptimal searches […]
A new study co-authored by an ESI Fellow, Catherine Bane, shows that over 90% of health screening reviews overlap, with some topics reviewed more than 60 times by different teams. The authors highlight potential research waste due to duplication and call for better coordination and more collaborative, globally inclusive approaches to evidence synthesis. The ESI […]
Congratulations to Andrew Dullea (SWAR 2023 awardee) for his recent publication in Cochrane Evidence Synthesis and Methods. His research focused on the sensitivity and completeness of search strategies using PubReMiner. PubReMiner is a text-mining tool that analyses a seed set of citations to assess word frequency in titles, abstracts, and Medical Subject Headings (MeSH). This […]
The Health Research Podcast – Ep 4: Assessing Ireland’s ability to produce & act on evidence rapidly Recorded at the HRB Conference 2025, the Health Research Podcast episode focuses on the HRB Rapid Evidence Support System Assessment (RESSA) for Ireland and its role in strengthening evidence-informed policymaking. The discussion features Dr Barbara Whelan, co-author of […]
Comparison of AI-assisted and human-generated plain language summaries for Cochrane reviews: a randomised non-inferiority trial (HIET-1) Evidence Synthesis Ireland contributed to the development of the registered report of Comparison of AI-assisted and human-generated plain language summaries for Cochrane reviews: a randomised non-inferiority trial (HIET-1). This report compares the comprehension, readability, quality, safety, and trustworthiness of artificial […]
Pratik Kumar Bal is an ESI PhD student based at the Health Economics and Policy Analysis Centre (HEPAC) at the University of Galway. His doctoral research focuses on Evidence Synthesis Methods for Health Economic Evaluation and Health Technology Assessment (HTA), under the supervision of Professor Paddy Gillespie (University of Galway) and Dr Kieran Walsh (Health Information and Quality Authority […]
