Investigations of transparency, reproducibility and replicability in science have been directed largely at individual studies. It is just as critical to explore these issues in systematic reviews, given their influence on decision-making and future research. In this talk, Dr Page presented data collected for the REPRISE (REProducibility and Replicability In Syntheses of Evidence) project. The objectives of the project were to evaluate in a sample of systematic reviews of interventions: (1) how frequently methods are reported completely, and how often review data and other materials are shared publicly; (2) systematic reviewers’ views on sharing review data and other materials and their understanding of and opinions about replication of reviews; (3) the extent of variation in results when we independently reproduce meta-analyses, and; (4) the extent of variation in results when we crowdsource teams to independently repeat the search, selection, data collection and analysis steps of a sample of original reviews.
Dr. Matthew Page is a Senior Research Fellow and Deputy Head of the Methods in Evidence Synthesis Unit in the School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine at Monash University in Australia. His research aims to improve the credibility of syntheses of health and medical research. He co-led the development of the PRISMA 2020 statement for systematic reviews and was a member of the core group who developed the RoB 2 tool for assessing risk of bias in randomized trials. He is an associate scientific editor for the Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions. He frequently collaborates with clinicians on systematic reviews of interventions for a range of conditions, which often informs his meta-research agenda.
