Abstract
Background: The value of rapid reviews in informing health care decisions is more evident since the onset of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. While systematic reviews can be completed rapidly, rapid reviews are usually a type of evidence synthesis in which components of the systematic review process may be simplified or omitted to produce information more efficiently within constraints of time, expertise, funding or any combination thereof. There is an absence of high-quality evidence underpinning some decisions about how we plan, do and share rapid reviews. We will conduct a modified James Lind Alliance Priority Setting Partnership to determine the top 10 unanswered research questions about how we plan, do and share rapid reviews in collaboration with patients, public, reviewers, researchers, clinicians, policymakers and funders. Methods: An international steering group consisting of key stakeholder perspectives (patients, the public, reviewers, researchers, clinicians, policymakers and funders) will facilitate broad reach, recruitment and participation across stakeholder groups. An initial online survey will identify stakeholders' perceptions of research uncertainties about how we plan, do and share rapid reviews. Responses will be categorised to generate a long list of questions. The list will be checked against systematic reviews published within the past three years to identify if the question is unanswered. A second online stakeholder survey will rank the long list in order of priority. Finally, a virtual consensus workshop of key stakeholders will agree on the top 10 unanswered questions. Discussion: Research prioritisation is an important means for minimising research waste and ensuring that research resources are targeted towards answering the most important questions. Identifying the top 10 rapid review methodology research priorities will help target research to improve how we plan, do and share rapid reviews and ultimately enhance the use of high-quality synthesised evidence to inform health care policy and practice.
Highlights
Systematic reviews summarise existing research and use structured and ‘explicit methods to identify, select and critically appraise relevant studies, and collect and analyse data from these studies’[1]
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has further increased the demand for rapid reviews due to the need to provide time-sensitive information to decision-makers[6]
Commonly focused on knowledge gaps surrounding the effects of treatments, the approach has been broadly applied to other areas such as diagnosis, prevention, and more recently, to identify methodology uncertainties in recruitment and retention within clinical trials[17,18]. This Priority III PSP aims to identify the top 10 unanswered research questions about how we plan, do and share rapid reviews, as identified and prioritised by contributors drawn from key stakeholder groups, including patients, the public, reviewers, researchers, clinicians, policymakers and funders
Summary
There is no universally accepted definition of a rapid review[3,6,12,13] and debate exists regarding the use of the word ‘rapid’, with several different synonyms previously identified within the literature[7,10]. These debates have been further complicated in the era of the COVID-19 pandemic where it has been highlighted that rapid reviews cannot be categorised based on the time taken to complete a review given that well-resourced conventional systematic reviews have been conducted to a high standard, rapidly
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