Systematic reviews are generally
considered a team undertaking, requiring sustained effort from many over time.
However, published systematic reviews may have as few as one author, calling
into question their methodological rigor. For this study, a dataset of 630
previously identified systematic reviews from five high impact general and
internal medicine journals from 2008-2012 was used.[1]
The
number of authors and the number of inclusion and exclusion criteria (or first
pass) screeners were extracted from each article in duplicate. The number of
authors and screeners was statistically compared to compliance
with Institute of Medicine (IOM) recommended standards
for finding and assessing individual studies (ANOVA)
as well
as overall reproducibility
(chi square)
