Last week I posted Making a community rapid review system as a way to see if there was interest in the concept.  The post has been viewed hundreds of times and we’ve now got a significant number of people who want to get involved to help shape the concept.  The response has been so positive my assumption is that we’ll build such a system.

However, we will not be rushing this as there are a number of issues to work through.  The main issue to consider is quality and how we can transparently communicate any issues that may affect the robustness of any conclusion(s).  But there are lots of other issues to work through, for instance:

• What data do we want to extract to help support decision making?  Effectiveness is one measure, but others could be important e.g. costs, adverse events etc.
• Authorship.  I like the idea of others coming in to improve initial reviews, how does this effect authorship (and dare I suggest ‘ownership’).
• Updating.  We can automate the search for new documents (e.g. SmartSearch) for a review.  But how do we handle this if the author(s) are not around to add the new research? My feeling is we need to add these documents to the review as ‘potential new articles of interest that are not yet incorporated’ – but that’s just my view.

So, it’s good we have the time to work through these issues and a group of enthusiasts to help shape the development.

My broad timeline is to continue refining the rapid review system and to present the results at a workshop at Evidence Live which is in June 2017.  It seems a long time but it’s only twenty weeks.