As mentioned previously we are trying to identify as many systematic reviews as possible to include in Trip. One method is to use third party services that capture academic publications from a variety of sources. We, in turn, try to identify systematic reviews from these service and add them to Trip. This works well – generally – but two issues have arisen that we had not anticipated.

Predatory journals: I received an email yesterday which started “I noticed on my most recent search that a predatory journal made it into into your search result“. It transpired that the article in question was a systematic review. In other words the 3rd party scraped the article from the web and we grabbed it ‘blindly’. This is clearly problematic and we’ll take steps to stop this happening in the future.

Pre-prints: This is less clear cut – so would welcome input. In the new system I’m seeing systematic reviews from places such as medRxiv. On one hand these are potentially problematic as they haven’t been through peer review. But on the other hand they are clearly labelled as not having gone through peer review and, also, they may well be good quality and contain valuable information that might not be seen for months (due to the slow peer review process).

It’d be interesting and useful to hear your thoughts on the above! So, please leave a comment or email me directly jon.brassey@tripdatabase.com