The Mass Production of Redundant, Misleading, and Conflicted Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses

Systematic reviews have currently become a high-output factory where very different stakeholders with various motives are involved: methodologists, academics, scholars, policymakers, health care professionals, altruistic volunteers, eager authorship-seekers, serious business professionals, and many others who may see systematic reviews as marketing tools.
Currently, there is massive production of unnecessary, misleading, and conflicted systematic reviews and meta-analyses. Instead of promoting evidence-based medicine and health care, these instruments often serve mostly as easily produced publishable units or marketing tools.

This article in The Millbank Quarterly finds that the publication of systematic reviews and meta-analyses should be realigned to remove biases and vested interests and to integrate them better with the primary production of evidence.

Ioannidis, John P.A. (2016), The Mass Production of Redundant, Misleading, and Conflicted Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses. The Millbank Quarterly, 94(3), 485-514