In my attempt to become a better researcher, I’m watching the Cochrane Evidence Essentials videos on systematic reviews.1
I’ve always wondered what it would take to conduct a systematic review, and while watching these videos thought it might be an interesting experiment to conduct a small one on my own, just to learn the process and see what it’s like to use some of the tools.
I used Perplexity.ai to get an idea of how long it might take to conduct a systematic review, and the answer is mind-blowing!
According to Glasziou and colleagues (2001),2 the average (health sciences) systematic review takes 1,139 hours to complete (that’s 30 full-time weeks!).
Duke University Libraries
The site goes on to list a few of the ways time is spent:
- 588 hours for protocol development, searching, and retrieval;
- 144 hours for statistical analysis;
- 206 hours for report writing; and
- 201 hours for administration.
To me this seems insane. And also makes me admire those colleagues I know who have done not just one, but multiple systematic reviews throughout their career.
Perhaps I’ll conduct a proper systematic review one day in the future. But, for now, it seems to be a better use of my time to rely on much quicker efforts, such as Elicit, that will guide you through an automated systematic review using artificial intelligence.
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Unfortunately, the videos appear to be in reverse order in this playlist, so you have to start from the bottom and click on the previous video before it advances to the next video. ↩︎
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Should it tell us something that even though this text was first published in 2001, Amazon does not list a newer version of the guide, or any more recent alternatives? ↩︎