The International Prospective Register of Systematic Reviews, better known as PROSPERO, is an open access online database of systematic review protocols on a wide range of topics. While it was initially restricted to medicine, as of 2021, it also accepts protocols in criminology, social care, education and international development, as long as there is a health-related outcome. Researchers can choose to have their reviews prospectively registered with PROSPERO. The database is produced by the Centre for Reviews and Dissemination at the University of York in England, and it is funded by the National Institute for Health Research.[1] Registration of systematic reviews in the database has been supported by PLoS Medicine,[2] BioMed Central, the EQUATOR Network, and BMJ editor-in-chief Fiona Godlee, among others.[1]

History

After the PRISMA statement was published in 2010, the University of York responded to its recommendation for prospective systematic review registration by beginning development of an online database of systematic reviews. The resulting PROSPERO database was launched in February 2011 by Frederick Curzon, 7th Earl Howe, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health. It was simultaneously launched at a Vancouver, Canada meeting organized by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research that month. By October 2011, the database included 200 records of systematic reviews that were being conducted at the time.[3] In October 2013, the Cochrane Collaboration began automatically including protocols of its systematic reviews in PROSPERO.[4] By October 10, 2017, the number of registered reviews in the database had increased to 26,535.[5]

Responses

In 2017, concern was raised that some protocols in PROSPERO could be "zombie reviews" for which the protocol had been registered, but its record in the database had not been updated to indicate that it had been completed. Andrade et al. showed that only 7% of all reviews registered in PROSPERO from 2011 to 2015 had since been marked as "completed". These authors suggested that many of these reviews were either abandoned, meaning they had not been completed or published, or, if they had been completed, had not had their PROSPERO record updated to reflect this.[6] Sideri et al. (2018) showed that orthodontics-related systematic reviews that were registered in PROSPERO were on average of higher methodological quality than those not so registered.[7] Proportion of registration in systems other than PROSPERO in the systematic review protocol is 1% from 2011 to 2020.[8]

References

  1. ^ a b "PROSPERO". University of York.
  2. ^ PLoS Medicine Editors (February 2011). "Best practice in systematic reviews: the importance of protocols and registration". PLOS Medicine. 8 (2): e1001009. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1001009. PMC 3042995. PMID 21364968. ((cite journal)): |author= has generic name (help)
  3. ^ Booth A, Clarke M, Dooley G, Ghersi D, Moher D, Petticrew M, Stewart L (February 2012). "The nuts and bolts of PROSPERO: an international prospective register of systematic reviews". Systematic Reviews. 1 (1): 2. doi:10.1186/2046-4053-1-2. PMC 3348673. PMID 22587842.
  4. ^ Moher D, Shamseer L, Clarke M, Ghersi D, Liberati A, Petticrew M, Shekelle P, Stewart LA (January 2015). "Preferred reporting items for systematic review and meta-analysis protocols (PRISMA-P) 2015 statement". Systematic Reviews. 4 (1): 1. doi:10.1186/2046-4053-4-1. PMC 4320440. PMID 25554246.
  5. ^ Page MJ, Shamseer L, Tricco AC (February 2018). "Registration of systematic reviews in PROSPERO: 30,000 records and counting". Systematic Reviews. 7 (1): 32. doi:10.1186/s13643-018-0699-4. PMC 5819709. PMID 29463298.
  6. ^ Andrade R, Pereira R, Weir A, Ardern CL, Espregueira-Mendes J (11 October 2017). "Zombie reviews taking over the PROSPERO systematic review registry. It's time to fight back!". British Journal of Sports Medicine. 53 (15): bjsports-2017-098252. doi:10.1136/bjsports-2017-098252. hdl:1765/109107. PMID 29021246. S2CID 40632962.
  7. ^ Sideri S, Papageorgiou SN, Eliades T (August 2018). "Registration in the international prospective register of systematic reviews (PROSPERO) of systematic review protocols was associated with increased review quality" (PDF). Journal of Clinical Epidemiology. 100: 103–110. doi:10.1016/j.jclinepi.2018.01.003. PMID 29339215. S2CID 3732833.
  8. ^ Banno M, Tsujimoto Y, Kataoka Y (February 2022). "Proportion of systematic review protocols registered outside of the International Prospective Register of Systematic Reviews (PROSPERO): A short report". Annals of Clinical Epidemiology. advpub (2): 49–52. doi:10.37737/ace.22007. S2CID 246687741.

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